Pill Head: The Secret Life of a Painkiller Addict by Joshua Lyon Page A
Authors: Joshua Lyon
Tags: Autobiography
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and some really informative exhibits on how all these different drugs interact in the body.
I ended up at the museum because I had a meeting with Chief Mark Caverly, who works for the DEA’s Liaison and Policy Section. He agreed to meet with me to discuss the DEA’s work on combating prescription painkiller diversion. His office is located near the Pentagon (and, more importantly since I arrived early for our meeting, directly across the street from the Pentagon City Mall food court).
The security for getting into the actual offices of the DEA building is pretty intense. There are at least four security guards at the main entrance, and you have to put your bags through an X-ray machine and be escorted inside by someone who works there. My contact was a member of the DEA’s press office who had been extremely helpful in setting up the interview. When we got in the elevator, there were several other people in it dressed in nearly identical dark blue suits,including a man and a woman who had obviously worked together before, but hadn’t seen each other in some time. The conversation went like this:
WOMAN: Oh, how are you? I haven’t seen you in forever! It’s like you just disappeared! We miss you!
MAN: Ha-ha, I miss you ladies too. I was transferred.
WOMAN: To what department?
MAN: I can’t tell you.
WOMAN ( SYMPATHETIC, UNDERSTANDING NOD ): Got it.
MAN: I mean, I could, but I’d have to kill you.
There was nervous laughter all around, followed by uncomfortable silence for the rest of the elevator ride.
When we got to our floor I was ushered into a plain conference room. The press agent sat down too, and I realized he wasn’t going to be leaving. Mark Caverly came in and sat down and I got this nervous feeling that I was being secretly videotaped. Caverly looked like he’d come straight from central casting for a DEA agent in a bureaucratic position, with his set-in-stone facial expression, blank eyes peering through wire-rimmed glasses, and perfectly pressed suit.
“So,” I asked, “why now? How did prescription painkillers get so huge?”
“I think there were some societal influences,” he said. “And I’ll give you my personal opinion. As a society, we turn to pharmaceutical drugs for everything. If you have a common cold, if you want to grow hair, whatever the medical condition is, we, as Americans, turn to pills to solve the problem. If you go to a doctor’s office and don’t get a prescription, most people feel shortchanged. They want medicine. And beyond that general acceptance of pills and pharmaceuticals, I think there’s a perception of safety with pharmaceutical drugs. When you talk to people about heroin or cocaine, they know there’s a danger to it. You don’t know what it’s been cut with, so you don’t know how strong it is. You don’t know what your reaction is going to be. And with pharmaceutical drugs, for the most part, they are FDA-approved and created under sterile circumstances. Add to that thefact that you get some of the same physical responses taking pharmaceuticals as you would with any opiate, like heroin. People taking Vicodin or hydrocodone, which is probably the most popular pharmaceutical drug in the United States, get the same rush as they would taking heroin, but you’re taking something that people perceive to be safe.”
Caverly was partially responsible for one of the nation’s currently most successful prescription-monitoring programs, called KASPER (Kentucky All Schedule Prescription Electronic Reporting). A prescription-monitoring program, or PMP, is exactly what it sounds like—a method of tracking an individual’s entire history of prescriptions, regardless of the doctor who had prescribed it. Kentucky was one of the earlier states to be hit with a particularly large Oxy-Contin abuse epidemic. “When I was working in Kentucky, we were seeing OxyContin being traded for services. It became a coin in trade. People who needed their car
I ended up at the museum because I had a meeting with Chief Mark Caverly, who works for the DEA’s Liaison and Policy Section. He agreed to meet with me to discuss the DEA’s work on combating prescription painkiller diversion. His office is located near the Pentagon (and, more importantly since I arrived early for our meeting, directly across the street from the Pentagon City Mall food court).
The security for getting into the actual offices of the DEA building is pretty intense. There are at least four security guards at the main entrance, and you have to put your bags through an X-ray machine and be escorted inside by someone who works there. My contact was a member of the DEA’s press office who had been extremely helpful in setting up the interview. When we got in the elevator, there were several other people in it dressed in nearly identical dark blue suits,including a man and a woman who had obviously worked together before, but hadn’t seen each other in some time. The conversation went like this:
WOMAN: Oh, how are you? I haven’t seen you in forever! It’s like you just disappeared! We miss you!
MAN: Ha-ha, I miss you ladies too. I was transferred.
WOMAN: To what department?
MAN: I can’t tell you.
WOMAN ( SYMPATHETIC, UNDERSTANDING NOD ): Got it.
MAN: I mean, I could, but I’d have to kill you.
There was nervous laughter all around, followed by uncomfortable silence for the rest of the elevator ride.
When we got to our floor I was ushered into a plain conference room. The press agent sat down too, and I realized he wasn’t going to be leaving. Mark Caverly came in and sat down and I got this nervous feeling that I was being secretly videotaped. Caverly looked like he’d come straight from central casting for a DEA agent in a bureaucratic position, with his set-in-stone facial expression, blank eyes peering through wire-rimmed glasses, and perfectly pressed suit.
“So,” I asked, “why now? How did prescription painkillers get so huge?”
“I think there were some societal influences,” he said. “And I’ll give you my personal opinion. As a society, we turn to pharmaceutical drugs for everything. If you have a common cold, if you want to grow hair, whatever the medical condition is, we, as Americans, turn to pills to solve the problem. If you go to a doctor’s office and don’t get a prescription, most people feel shortchanged. They want medicine. And beyond that general acceptance of pills and pharmaceuticals, I think there’s a perception of safety with pharmaceutical drugs. When you talk to people about heroin or cocaine, they know there’s a danger to it. You don’t know what it’s been cut with, so you don’t know how strong it is. You don’t know what your reaction is going to be. And with pharmaceutical drugs, for the most part, they are FDA-approved and created under sterile circumstances. Add to that thefact that you get some of the same physical responses taking pharmaceuticals as you would with any opiate, like heroin. People taking Vicodin or hydrocodone, which is probably the most popular pharmaceutical drug in the United States, get the same rush as they would taking heroin, but you’re taking something that people perceive to be safe.”
Caverly was partially responsible for one of the nation’s currently most successful prescription-monitoring programs, called KASPER (Kentucky All Schedule Prescription Electronic Reporting). A prescription-monitoring program, or PMP, is exactly what it sounds like—a method of tracking an individual’s entire history of prescriptions, regardless of the doctor who had prescribed it. Kentucky was one of the earlier states to be hit with a particularly large Oxy-Contin abuse epidemic. “When I was working in Kentucky, we were seeing OxyContin being traded for services. It became a coin in trade. People who needed their car
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