Oxycontin: Mother's Little Helper, or Heroin with Quality Control...

You show me a drug addict, not a recreational drug user, mind you, but a full blown addict who will actually get sick and go through serious withdrawals, and I'll show you a housewife, a factory worker, a delivery driver... I'll show you an athlete, a politician and a doctor, and yes, I'll show you a child... In fact, the scariest thing about the direction drug use is taking lately is that it is affecting younger and younger people. It used to be that the lines outside methadone treatment centers were filled with people who looked like they just slept under a bridge... down on their luck... usually aging junkies with years of heroin use under their belt, leading to homelessness, disease, incarceration, and eventually, death. Now, most of the addicts seeking help look just like anyone else! They come from all walks of life, stopping their downward spiral at all different levels of near ruin... and nearly half the addicts seeking help are under 20 years old! A stunning and disturbing trend, to be sure, and it can be attributed to one giant phenomenon... Oxycontin abuse.

Oxycontin is a strong, time released opiatenarcotic painkiller derived from thebaine, the same alkaloid of the opium poppy responsible for the creation of heroin. In a sense, Oxycontin is nothing more than pharmaceutical, quality controlled heroin, but is prescribed by many doctors for serious chronic pain without too much regard for the aftermath. A typical patient in this state will willingly take anything that will return them to some semblance of normalcy after a serious injury or a prolonged degenerating condition, so the addict is born in this way with little resistance and little education. What the doctor may fail to point out, is that if the patient stops using the drug, they will get sicker and sicker as the withdrawal symptoms progress...

By the next day, they will go through an immediate set of withdrawal symptoms similar in every way to heroin withdrawal; diarrhea, vomiting, heat flashes, chills, goose-flesh, cold sweats, acute muscle and joint cramps, sleeplessness, apathy, depression... except that with Oxycontin the symptoms are ten times worse. Opiates, like heroin, Oxycontin, and even Percocet and Vicodin work by blocking opioid receptors in the brain, making methadone one of the only replacement drugs proven effective at weening an addict out of opiate dependence. Some success is being enjoyed with the use of a newer treatment drug called Suboxone, which is currently available at some of the same treatment facilities. Methadone treatment works on the premise that it can be stepped gradually down to decrease one's tolerance to near zero before quitting entirely, thereby seriously reducing the effects of withdrawal.

Blocking the opioid receptors causes a euphoric sensation, much like the body's natural endorphin release, that has been used to control pain for centuries... and for centuries, there have been those who would abuse it. Like the opium dens throughout history, a certain psyche gravitates to this distraction, paying nearly any obscene amount of money or time basking in its false sensory indulgence.

Coincidentally, Oxycontin has a street value higher than heroin and cocaine combined, making abuse of the medical prescription system a big business! Being able to easily sell a whole prescription, or get $60 a pill for 80mg Oxycontin, many patients sell some or all of their pills and just deal with their pain. Many insurance companies wont cover this medicine, so patients who are so messed up that they can no longer earn money often sell just enough on the streets to cover the cost of the expensive drug, making it even more available to street addicts without prescriptions.

Not too surprisingly, addicts have come up with many ways to abuse this drug, since the pill form becomes ineffective at providing the same high once one's tolerance increases. Many needle users cook the pill down and shoot it intravenously, just like heroin, while others are satisfied with just getting rid of the time release feature by crushing it up and snorting it like cocaine. The most popular form of abuse, at least among the younger crowd, is melting it on a piece of tin foil and inhaling the smoke. Methadone clinics are full of teens who thought this was a way to circumvent it's addictive properties by not "ingesting" the pill orally or otherwise. No matter what the method, people all across the continent are finding out the hard way that this is not a sustainable lifestyle... While methadone treatment remains effective at providing recovering addicts with a chance to get their lives under control, it is by no means a cheap fix. The current rate for outpatient methadone treatment hovers at around $400 a month, (about the cost of a new sports car,) and due to the estimated recovery time for most addicts, this can be a very expensive alternative. As with most drugs, the best solution is don't start! This can be a real challenge for today's kids, who not only get exposed to these types of drugs on the streets, but get bombarded with glorifying lyrics and desensitized humor on the radio and TV...

©2010 Steven G. Curry, All Rights Reserved