How Chronic Pain Led Me to Illegal Drugs

(Editor's note: This column was written by someone I've known for several years and consider a friend. The author is intelligent, college educated and works full time. They also have a progressive and incurable chronic pain condition. Like a growing number of pain patients who are undertreated or have lost access to pain care, my friend has turned to illegal drugs for pain relief. For obvious reasons, we are not disclosing the author's name.) 

For me, it started with borrowing a couple hydrocodone pills from my uncle, who’d just had surgery and didn’t finish his prescription.  

Technically illegal? Yes. Illegal illegal? Not really. That’s what I told myself.

I run out of pain pills early every month — because they are prescribed to take one every six hours and only last about three. So I was happy to have a few more to get through those last few days before my refill.  

I always need more though, because the pain is always there. So I started to swap pills with my cousin, who also has chronic pain.  “Here, take 10 of mine today,” I’d offer.  

Then a few days later, I’d go back with, “Okay, now I need to borrow some pills from you. Maybe just five to get me through until my next refill?”  

I know she would never consider those drug deals. She would never consider herself a dealer. She goes to church for goodness sake. 

Eventually, I started to pay a little cash for 5mg pills from a friend of a friend, because it seems only fair to give him something in return.

I guess that’s about as “drug deal” as drug deals get. Here is money for you in exchange for drugs for me. There’s no way to really argue that.   

But it still didn’t feel like a drug deal. He’s doing me a favor, so I’m doing him a favor. We’re working professionals. We’re not meeting in a dark alley. Nobody has a gun on them. We’re just helping each other.

Then I started buying marijuana to see if it would help with the pain.  I felt like marijuana was easier to get than my monthly pain pill prescription. And as long as I had the money, I could get as much as I wanted.  

I bought it from an old high school friend, who has a quiet house in the country and always invites me over for dinner. It felt more like buying homemade jewelry than buying homemade drugs. And she’d send me home with marijuana edibles that didn’t seem all that different than any other muffins my friends would bake for me.  

Recreational marijuana isn’t legal where I live, but it is in a lot of other places, so it’s still easy to justify this one to myself. My state is just a little behind. We’ll catch up. And soon buying an eighth won’t be much different than buying a pack of cigarettes.  

The marijuana doesn’t help me much other than putting me to sleep, so I hardly ever buy it. But if it did work — if it helped anywhere close to the way hydrocodone does — I would become a regular customer.  

Since I didn’t like it or use that much, I ended up selling some leftover marijuana to a friend’s uncle. That’s about when I officially became a dealer myself, I suppose.  

And now, I’m regularly buying extra hydrocodone from the local drug dealer. I meet up with him in the alley behind his apartment. He does not make drug dealing look glamorous. He never has enough money for his phone bill, he always needs a ride, and I’m pretty sure he uses the money I give him to buy heroin.  

I tell myself that most people would do what I was doing if they were enduring the kind of daily, debilitating chronic pain that I have. It’s either this or suicide.  

I try to get my doctor to increase my prescription and hold my breath every time they drug test me. So far, I’ve always passed. And so far, my prescription has yet to last me until the end of the month.  

All these illegal drugs get expensive. $10 for one 10mg hydrocodone. You can whip through $300 a week easily. Hydrocodone is more expensive than heroin and even harder to get.  

Sometimes I wonder if I should just take the leap and buy $20 worth of heroin, which would be more potent than $400 worth of hydrocodone pills. I know where I can get it now, thanks to my new connections to the local dealer.  

But so far, I’ve resisted. Not worth the possible side effects. Not worth the hassle. And not worth the potential legal issues. If I buy hydrocodone, I can slip them into one of my pill bottles with a legitimate label and the cops would have a hard time proving they weren’t mine. Heroin is a little more difficult to hide. 

I know some heroin users and they aren’t like the ones in the movies. They aren’t shooting up in dark alleys. They’re doing it in the morning to combat chronic pain. They’re doing it so they can go to work. They’re doing it because their legitimate doctor cut them off. They’re doing it so they can live their lives.  

And that’s what I'm doing, too. I bought 10 hydrocodone this morning, because I needed something to get me through the work day. Without opioid pain medication, I wouldn’t even be able to check my emails.  

I don’t know what the solution is, but I do know that when you’re in pain, you’ll do anything to make it stop. And as long as the only way to make it stop comes down to buying illegal drugs or killing myself, I’ll keep choosing illegal drugs — and pray that it doesn’t lead to me accidentally killing myself.  

The information in this column should not be considered as professional medical advice, diagnosis or treatment. It is for informational purposes only and represents the author’s opinions alone. It does not inherently express or reflect the views, opinions and/or positions of Pain News Network.