Dopesick - Beth Macy Page 0,53

Big Pharma but also on the broader American narrative that promotes all pills as a quick fix. Between 1998 and 2005, the abuse of prescription drugs increased a staggering 76 percent.

While opioids have resulted in the direst consequences, Lembke is equally leery of benzodiazepines (prescribed for anxiety) and stimulants, both of which make teenagers—especially underchallenged kids who aren’t engaged in meaningful activities—dangerously comfortable with the notion of taking pills. Any pills. Whether the pills originated in a bottle with their name on it or came from a bowl at a so-called pharm party.

Emergency-room administrator Dr. John Burton watched the cultural shift play out at the North Carolina YMCA summer camp he attended as a kid and returned to later as the camp doctor. Whereas very few campers took prescribed medications in the 1970s, by the mid-1990s 10 percent were taking a pill at some point during the day—most for asthma or allergy conditions, followed by a small subset of kids on behavioral medications, usually for ADHD.

By 2012, fully one-third of his campers were on meds, mostly ADHD medications, antidepressants, and antipsychotics. “What happens is, we’ve changed our whole culture, from one where kids don’t take pills at all to one where you’ve got a third or more of kids who are on pills to stay well because of what are believed to be chronic health conditions,” Burton said. “They get so used to taking pills that eventually they end up using them for a recreational high.”

So it went that young people barely flinched at the thought of taking Adderall to get them going in the morning, an opioid painkiller for a sports injury in the afternoon, and a Xanax to help them sleep at night, many of the pills doctor-prescribed. So it went that two-thirds of college seniors reported being offered prescription stimulants for nonmedical use by 2012—from friends, relatives, and drug dealers.

“In the short term, kids and parents and even teachers may feel better” about Adderall’s ability to enhance memory and attention, Lembke said. “But studies show that over the long term those kids don’t do any better in school than people who don’t receive stimulants.”

And among those whose stimulant usage becomes a gateway to harder drugs, they’re doing much worse. That was true for Spencer Mumpower, who routinely traded Adderall for marijuana, and Ritalin for cocaine. That was true for almost every addicted young adult I interviewed for this book.

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As Spencer prepared for prison in the fall of 2012, the remainder of the Hidden Valley group with whom he’d abused drugs kept on as usual to avoid becoming dopesick. Whether that meant recruiting new users at parties or taking jobs at senior moving companies with the express intent of stealing opioids from retirees, targeting the expired or leftover prescriptions so the client wouldn’t notice.

“If it was a current medication, I’d take just a couple,” recalled a recovering heroin user I’ll call Brian, then a Hidden Valley High School student, a doctor’s son, and a member of the marching band. “If it was an old prescription, I’d take the whole bottle. Some old people would tell me, ‘Just throw it away,’ and I’d definitely take those.”

Dependent on pills by age seventeen, Brian was twenty when a co-worker introduced him to heroin. He snorted it first from waxed-paper bags marked colombian coffee and blue magic, in wrappers so small he could hide them inside his phone case. “From the moment I did that first bag, I can tell you, looking back now, it was destined,” he said. After snorting the crushed-up Oxys, inhaling the heroin powder was easy—and the heroin was cheaper, more intense, and, increasingly, it was everywhere he went. Though he was deeply troubled by Scott Roth’s death, little else but drugs mattered anymore. Another friend taught him how to inject himself; he bought the needles at a local drugstore, telling the pharmacist he needed them for insulin.

“It was like shooting Jesus up in your arm,” Brian said of his first IV injection. “It’s like this white explosion of light in your head. You’re floating on a cloud. You don’t yet know that the first time is the best. After that, you’re just chasing that first high.”

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Within six months, Brian had blown through the $8,000 he’d put aside for college and pawned his Xbox and video games, all without his parents’ knowledge. “I would spend six hours a day driving around Roanoke picking up drugs, waiting for phone calls, going to ATMs.”

His parents noticed he was moodier than