preface
In our lives, we all suffer. For some, the experience of pain—whether physical or psychological—is blessedly short-lived. For others, it can be an enduring life sentence of torture.
Pain is the physical or psychological suffering that reduces a person’s quality of life. The opposite of suffering is happiness. If human beings are to live full, happy, productive lives, then pain must be addressed in all its origins, causes, significance, management, and remedies.
According to Viktor Frankl, a Holocaust survivor and philosopher, “Meaning is possible even in spite of suffering—provided that the suffering is unavoidable. If it were avoidable, however, the meaningful thing to do would be to remove its cause.”
In the 1990s, pain was thought to be undertreated in the health-care field, so American medical professionals began looking for ways to eliminate pain in patients. In 1995, Purdue Pharma released OxyContin, a powerful painkiller, to the public. Purdue Pharma actively and unethically marketed this opioid as an innocuous drug that could be safely used to treat pain in a wide variety of people and conditions without the risk of addiction.
In 2001, pain was newly classified as the “fifth vital sign” by the Joint Commission, the country’s leading accrediting body for hospitals that helps health-care systems improve performance. The four other vital signs—body temperature, blood pressure, breathing rate, and pulse rate—continue to be definitively measured in order to know the state of a person’s essential body functions. With good intentions designed to ease suffering, the medical field tried to measure pain, by asking patients to rate it on a scale of smiley-faces and frowny faces from “none” to “severe.” This has erroneously led to the idea that patients can become completely “pain free.”
Unfortunately, pain and suffering cannot be objectively measured. They are subjective.
The promise of drugs—opioids in particular—was to release the American people from their pain and suffering. Instead, opioids have become a death sentence for countless human beings. Overdose deaths from opioids, including painkillers, heroin, and synthetics like fentanyl, have increased exponentially every year since the release of OxyContin. Opioids kill more than forty thousand Americans each year. They annually take the lives of more people than cars or guns.
When a plane goes down and kills three hundred people, it becomes headline news. The drug deaths of forty thousand people a year in today’s current condemnatory climate is sadly nothing more than a passing sound bite. But the deaths of so many human beings can’t be dismissed. It is an epidemic. It is a tragedy. Statistically, most opioid users are young people—our sons, daughters, sisters, and brothers. We are losing our future generations to opioid addiction and overdoses. In our societal and personal quest to eliminate pain, we have created a larger, deeper kind of endless suffering—the destruction of lives, the demise of family structures, and the deaths of people we know and love.
In understanding and managing our human pain from physical ailments, broken hearts, mental illness, or human existence, I hope we will one day find effective ways to relieve our suffering. Part of that is accepting that the human condition invariably involves some degree of suffering. We can’t eliminate it completely. It’s how we manage the pain that is the question. As a recovering opioid addict who has successfully climbed out of the depths of agony and darkness, I can unequivocally say that human connection can be one of the most powerful antidotes to human suffering and pain.
In summarizing the opioid crisis that continues to take so many lives, I leave you with another quote from Viktor Frankl: “For what matters is to bear witness to the uniquely human potential at its best, which is to transform a personal tragedy into triumph, to turn one’s predicament into a human achievement. When we are no longer able to change a situation…we are challenged to change ourselves.”
I was just a child when the drug company Purdue Pharma unleashed a tidal wave of the powerful narcotic OxyContin into Milford, Connecticut, the small town where I lived. My community wasn’t alone. Every city in the United States was affected by what would become the largest drug crisis in U.S. history.
By the time the government and the American population discovered the true danger of OxyContin, it was too late. When Purdue Pharma was convicted in 2007 for misrepresenting the risk of OxyContin and forced to pay $600 million in fines, the majority of Oxy addicts had already switched to heroin and powerful synthetic narcotics such as fentanyl. By 2016, there were more than 289 million prescriptions written each year for opioids and over 2.1 million opioid addicts.
By 2017 at the peak of the epidemic, Purdue Pharma was still actively promoting OxyContin and misleading doctors. Opioid overdoses had become the leading cause of accidental death in the United States. Between 1999 and 2019, almost one million Americans had died from accidental overdoses, 450,000 from opioids alone. The death rates were so high that they depressed the average life expectancy in America for many years in a row.
My loving, middle-class childhood could never have prepared me for what was waiting around the corner for me, my friends, and my family as opioids began to find a foothold in our town. There was no way to foresee that my friends and I—just average teenagers—would unwittingly get caught up in a drug epidemic that would have far-reaching consequences on all our lives. Eventually, I would go from a normal, happy kid who played basketball, hung out with my friends, and got good grades in school to a full-fledged opioid addict and drug dealer. My teens and early twenties would come to resemble a wasteland—a horror story that took place right in my hometown.
Instead of college graduations, where my friends and I would shift our tassels from right to left and throw our caps in the air, there were multiple-count felony indictments and courtrooms.
Instead of climbing the corporate ladder or saving for my first home, I was pulled out of cars at gunpoint during robbery attempts and Major Crime Task Force investigations.
Instead of romantic white weddings or sweet baptisms, I attended the funerals of lifelong friends who’d wanted to shoot up just one more bag of heroin and instead choked to death on their own vomit before exiting this world in a zipped black bag.
Fast-forward a decade to 2019, and suddenly the opioid epidemic had become a national conversation. Strewn across Facebook were photos of unconscious overdosed parents, slumped over the steering wheel while their kids cried in the back seat. First responders told horrific stories of being unable to keep up with the thousands of people strung out on heroin who needed assistance. In some states, freezers lined hospital parking lots because the morgue couldn’t keep up with the number of dead overdose victims. Thousands of children went to foster care every year after their parents died from opioid overdoses and left them orphaned.
The situation had reached a critical level, and the government took major legislative action under extreme pressure from parents, schools, and local law enforcement. With over 135,000 people dying annually from addiction—40,000-plus from opioids alone—and more than 100 million people directly or indirectly affected by the disease, it became a conversation that went as far as influencing campaign promises for the 2016 Trump vs. Clinton presidential battle.
Finally, something was being done.
But in the early 2000s, my close friends and I essentially lived in a silo. There was no press coverage. There were no organizations dedicated to changing legislation and making sure the conversation was center stage. There was no conversation. There was just us…a group of seventeen- and eighteen-year-old kids who thought it might be cool to try a new drug called OxyContin. Some, like me, had been prescribed the drug for a past injury and remembered what Oxy felt like. Others just wanted to give it a try during a weekend party.