Addict Nation (8 page)

Chapter Two
THE PHARMERS: Addicted to Pharmaceuticals

E
very so often we wake up with no clue that this will become one of those days to remember. It’s June 25, 2009. I am in gloriously sunny Puerto Rico, and it’s the first time I have taken any time off since I started my HLN TV show
Issues
eight months earlier. The National Association of Hispanic Journalists is having its yearly convention in San Juan. The palm trees are dancing to a fragrant tropical breeze as recognizable TV hosts and reporters from all over the country chat one another up in the open-air lobby of a gorgeous oceanfront hotel. Suddenly, a weird energy starts to ripple through the crowd. Heads dip down toward their BlackBerrys. My cell phone rings. It’s my show’s senior booker.

“Jane, hi, sorry to interrupt your vacation but,” she paused ominously, “ . . . we think Michael Jackson is dead.”

I am staring at the gorgeous Caribbean sea, but my mind is suddenly oceans away. A few miles inland from the Pacific Ocean, in Los Angeles, Michael Jackson has been transported to a hospital. He is not breathing and is soon pronounced dead. His family believes he was dead on arrival and are convinced he was murdered.
¹

Almost immediately, my friends start texting me: “Y R U in PR? MJ’s DEAD!!!” I take it personally for a moment. “I’M NOT A PSYCHIC!!” is my irritated reply. This is the biggest celebrity news to break since my show started, and I’m stranded on an island thousands of miles away from this monumental story. Since I was one of a small cluster of reporters in the courtroom for the entire Michael Jackson molestation trial, I’m particularly associated with all things Jackson. Talk about bad timing! My frustration meter is peaking, but I force myself to let it go with a shrug because I’m totally powerless over this predicament.

Fortunately for me, this is a story with . . . as they say . . . legs.

In the coming days, the world would learn about the King of Pop’s addiction to his “milk.” That was Jackson’s nickname for the powerful surgical knockout drug propofol, which is only supposed to be used in hospital settings to put patients under for surgery. Doctors have jokingly called the white liquid “milk of amnesia” for its ability to almost instantly render a person completely unconscious. It would turn out that Michael was using propofol as a sleep aid to get some serious naptime in as he prepared for his make-or-break comeback tour ironically entitled “This Is It.” Propofol would literally knock him out in a second or two, guaranteeing the superstar at least a few hours’ respite from his chronic insomnia.

Michael Jackson had an in-house physician, Dr. Conrad Murray, who would later be charged with involuntary manslaughter for his actions in the hours leading up to Jackson’s death. Cops say the doctor admitted to giving Jackson a head-spinning cocktail of drugs over the course of just a few hours. The list included the sedatives Valium, lorazepam (Ativan), and midazolam (Versed), plus the painkiller lidocaine, topped off with propofol (Diprivan).
²

While the circumstances of Michael Jackson’s death may have seemed shocking, they shouldn’t have surprised anyone. A couple of years before his death, Michael Jackson had been sued after racking up a $100,000 tab at a Beverly Hills pharmacy.
³
Famous friends, from Uri Geller to Deepak Chopra, were extremely concerned about the star: Chopra refused him painkillers, and Gellar warned Jackson he was going to die if he continued to abuse drugs.
⁴
But here’s the key fact—not a single drug mentioned in connection with Michael Jackson’s death is an illegal drug. They were all
legal
prescription drugs being inappropriately prescribed and then abused by perhaps the world’s most famous, and arguably, most talented pill popper.

Falling Stars

Michael Jackson has plenty of competition. The list of celebrities who have overdosed on legal prescription drugs is long and growing fast. Heath Ledger overdosed in his fashionable Manhattan loft on a combination of oxycodone, hydrocodone, diazepam, alprazolam, temazepam, and doxylamine, otherwise known as the painkillers OxyContin and Vicodin, the antianxiety drugs Valium and Xanax, and the sleep aids Restoril and Unisom.
⁵
Again, all perfectly legal . . . and all potentially deadly when combined and otherwise misused. Anna Nicole Smith had a head-spinning array of legal prescription drugs in her system when she died in a Florida hotel room. Lexapro, Zoloft, Cipro, Klonopin, Valium, Ativan, Robaxin, and the powerful sleep aid chloral hydrate were found in her system. Reports claimed that toward the end, Anna Nicole was slugging chloral hydrate right out of the bottle.
⁶

Shop to Pop Till You Drop

We’ve all heard about secretly addicted patients who go from doctor to doctor, claiming all sorts of ailments, from back pain to migraines, convincing each physician to prescribe painkillers before moving on to the next M.D. Many of these patients will also go into psychological therapy to squeeze antianxiety meds and antidepressants out of their psychiatrists. The various doctors don’t know about each other and have no idea (or pretend to have no idea) that their patient is shopping around for as many drugs as he or she can get. The fact is, if someone is strung out on pills, it eventually becomes rather obvious. Their eyes are glassy, and they’re often twitchy and scattered. Many doctors prefer not to notice and collect their fees rather than risk an uncomfortable confrontation with a patient demanding drugs, who will always ferociously insist it’s to relieve exquisite pain. Drug addicts, in their desperation to score, can be very persuasive.

Eighties’ TV and movie star Corey Haim may well become the poster child for doctor shopping. In March 2010, the
Lost Boys
actor collapsed and died in his mother’s Los Angeles apartment, at the age of thirty-eight. While he had very bad chest congestion, many in Hollywood immediately suspected an overdose. For decades, Corey had been an incorrigible drug addict. He once described himself on
Larry King Live
as a “chronic relapser.” The prescription-pill habit got so bad that he became almost destitute.

Corey’s agent insisted that, when he took Corey on as a client about a year and a half before his death, he did it on the condition that Corey get clean. His agent insisted to me “live” on
Issues
that Corey had cleaned up his act. The agent was convinced Corey didn’t die of a drug overdose, although he added Corey might have had a bad reaction to medications his addiction specialist was giving him. Wait! A doctor was giving Corey Haim drugs in order to get him off drugs? That makes no sense to me. Some drug addicts, when they first get sober, are so riddled with drugs they need to be gradually weaned off so they don’t go into convulsions or worse. But that process should never take a year and a half. If the agent had insisted a year and a half earlier that Corey get clean, then Corey should not have been taking
any
drugs, period!

Sobriety means the absence of
all
mood-altering drugs with the rare exception of an absolute medical necessity, and then for only as long as absolutely medically necessary. Sobriety does not mean giving the addict less-potent drugs. That’s called “managing” your addiction, and it’s almost always guaranteed to fail because an addict is precisely someone who cannot practice moderation. Most people seem to understand this concept when it comes to alcohol, but sometimes get confused when it comes to prescription pills because they’re “medicine.” Just as a drunk cannot have a sip of alcohol without triggering a craving that can result in a major binge, so a pill head cannot take any mood-altering pills because even half a pill can provoke a powerful craving for a lot more of the same. Even half a pill puts addicts
into their disease
, physically, emotionally, and psychologically. Still, addicts often manage to use the “I’m weaning myself off ” excuse to score more drugs.

“It’s not a Hollywood issue. It’s a country-wide issue that only gets talked about when the rich and famous die.”

—Howard Samuels, Psy.D., licensed clinical psychologist,
founder, and CEO of the Hills Treatment Center in Los Angeles

The controversy over Corey’s death dominated the headlines. As we all waited for the inevitably slow toxicology report to come back, more and more reports surfaced that Corey was still up to his old tricks. California’s then–attorney general Jerry Brown announced that Corey Haim’s name had popped up on a fraudulently obtained prescription for the powerful drug OxyContin, which is sometimes referred to as “Hillbilly Heroin.”
⁷
The phony prescription scheme was linked to a massive illegal prescription drug ring operating out of Southern California. Brown said this ring would steal legitimate doctors’ identities and use that information to print up phony prescription pads. Prescription pads are like cash; they’re a currency unto themselves. The counterfeit prescriptions were then sold to drug abusers and street pushers, who would go to drugstore after drugstore to get massive quantities of pills.

Brown added that Corey was also going to legitimate doctors and obtaining prescriptions from them. Haim’s name came up on multiple prescriptions in the state’s system. “He had dozens of doctors, many, many prescriptions, using many, many pharmacies, more than a dozen,” said Brown,
⁸
who tallied the total number of prescription pills obtained by the actor in the months before his death at more than 500. This would appear to be classic “doctor shopping.”

When the coroner’s conclusions were finally issued, we were told Corey Haim died of “natural” causes from pneumonia that had damaged his lungs, complicated by an enlarged heart and clogged arteries. But even though the coroner said drugs didn’t kill him or contribute to his death, they did find low levels of eight different drugs in his system. The toxicology tests turned up the antidepressant fluoxetine (Prozac), the antipsychotic olanzapine, the antianxiety drug diazepam (Valium), the muscle relaxer carisoprodol, and the tranquilizer meprobamate. He was also taking a cough suppressant and an antihistamine.
⁹

Additionally, the coroner’s investigative report noted several bottles of prescription pills were found in Haim’s name, including hydrocodone, the key ingredient in Vicodin. The narrative adds, “The decedent usually took 7 Tylenol PMs every night to help him sleep,” although he did not take any on the last night of his life.

While my heart goes out to his family, that is not a profile of sobriety. As a recovering alcoholic, I can attest that everything an addict does is skewed and poisoned by the obsession to use. If I had died before I got sober, alcohol would have been a huge factor, even if I was technically sober at the moment of death. Addiction destroys your ability to take care of yourself. And that can impact everything from your grooming to your health.

These tragic cases get lots of attention, from the media and from law enforcement, because they involve famous people. But all over America, not-so-famous people are seeing their lives destroyed by prescription drugs. They’re keeling over, left and right, from meds prescribed by their doctors, and nobody is doing a damn thing! This crisis is much more widespread than even the overdose statistics reflect. Tens of millions of Americans are walking, working, and driving around in an unnecessary and debilitating fog because they’re high on a little pill that they got from their doctor.

Robert DuPont, a former White House drug czar who once ran the National Institute on Drug Abuse, put it bluntly: “The biggest and fastest-growing part of America’s drug problem is prescription drug abuse.”
¹⁰
In 2009, powerful narcotic painkillers accounted for almost 10 percent of all prescribed drugs.
¹¹

America’s Real Drug Conspiracy

Law enforcement, the federal government, the medical community, and the pharmaceutical industry all have a vested interest in maintaining the status quo. The result is that illegal drug users and pushers, who are mostly poor and minority, are being prosecuted in huge numbers while the abusers of legal prescription drugs, who are mostly middle-class whites, are getting high with little reason to worry about being incarcerated.

“For the upper middle class it’s a lot safer to go to a doctor and get these drugs than it is to go on the street and put yourself at risk of being arrested.”

—Howard Samuels, Psy.D., licensed clinical psychologist, founder, and
CEO of the Hills Treatment Center

Our nation is in the throes of a prescription drug abuse crisis of unprecedented proportions, and our myopic, jaded, and complacent criminal justice system is in see-no-evil, hear-no-evil mode!

Corey Haim was allegedly going to dozens of doctors. Did those doctors ever think to Google the star’s name to see if he had a reputation for being a druggie? Had they taken this simple step, his own pronouncements about his being a chronic relapser would have popped right up. And we know Haim’s name came up in the state system in connection with numerous prescriptions. In an effort to cut down on rampant prescription drug abuse, California has created a program that gives doctors and pharmacists real-time access to a patient’s history of prescription drug use. More than 100 million dispensed drugs are listed in that database, and every year 60,000 doctors and pharmacists ask the right questions.
¹²
But clearly there are plenty of doctors who don’t want to know.

Our War on Some Drugs

The truth is: America’s taxpayer-funded “War on Drugs” is primarily a war on illegal drugs, like cocaine and heroin. Depending on how you estimate it, Uncle Sam spends at least $13 billion a year in the War on Drugs.
¹³
Some insist it’s more than twice that. That’s nuts! Has it put so much as a dent in the drug cartels wreaking havoc on our border? This misguided war continues even though prescription painkillers have now surpassed heroin and cocaine as the leading cause of fatal overdoses. The Centers for Disease Control (CDC) says more than 26,000 Americans overdose every year.
¹⁴
Most
of these fatal ODs are caused by prescription drugs! Nationwide, deaths from prescription-drug overdoses are the second-leading cause of accidental death behind car accidents.
In some states,
prescription-drug overdoses are the leading cause of accidental fatalities.
¹⁵
But for the most part, this epidemic is being ignored. Meanwhile, addicts take advantage of the lack of scrutiny to game the system. On
Issues
,
I spoke with a recovering addict who we called Nikki, not her real name. Nikki appeared in silhouette to explain how she doctor-shopped with impunity, selling some of the prescription drugs she obtained, while downing the rest to feed her own habit.