Journalist Writes about Painkiller Addiction in “Pill Head”

Journalist Joshua Lyon, who was once addicted to prescription medications, tells his story and investigates the phenomenon of online pharmacies in his book, Pill Head: The Secret Life of a Painkiller Addict. Featured on NPR, Lyon’s book chronicles his struggles with prescription painkiller addiction.

After a year of steady abuse of Valium, Xanax, and Vicodin, Lyon realized that he needed to quit after being given morphine following a surgical procedure. Because of the tolerance he had built up to opiate painkillers, the morphine did nothing to make his pain go away. Lyon then quit the drugs for six months but later resumed his habit. After a friend intervened, he finally quit for good, but he still suffers from memory loss as a result of his addiction.

In Pill Head, Lyon explains that in the summer of 2003, he and his co-workers at Jane magazine began receiving emails offering Valium, Xanax, and Vicodin with “no prescription needed.” After repeatedly deleting them, Lyon started thinking about the emails more and more. His own physician refused to prescribe him a sleeping pill for a flight he took in the weeks following 9/11, so Lyon assumed it couldn’t really be that easy to obtain medications like these.

“Strictly in the name of journalistic curiosity,” Lyon convinced his editor to let him try to buy some of these pills online. He wrote, “I wanted to see if it was just a scam or if it really was that simple to get controlled substances without a doctor’s prescription.” The story was approved for the pop culture section of the magazine, and he was given a $600 drug budget.

Lyon explains that the Xanax and Valium were easy—he just had to fill out an online form explaining why he needed the drugs (he wrote that he had a fear of flying and had to travel often for work). Within 48 hours the drugs appeared on his desk, and he had spent $312.

For the Vicodin, Lyon was told that a doctor would call him for a consultation. He was also supposed to provide a phone number for his primary physician. Lyon gave a fake name for the doctor and his real work number. The “doctor” called the next morning, and Lyon said he just had his appendix removed and didn’t have insurance, and that the company’s Vicodin prices seemed affordable.

Then the “doctor” asked if he wanted 30, 60, or 90 pills. Lyon said 90, of course, and was charged $223. The drugs arrived the next day. Lyon wrote a quick article about how “ridiculously easy” it was for him to order the pills online and took the bottles home. Then his editor frantically called him to ask what he was going to do with the pills, worried that he would start using them.

“I spent the entire train ride out here imagining you face down on the floor somewhere,” she said. “I can just see the headlines now: ‘Magazine kills editor.’ It’s the last thing we need.”

Lyon promised her he would flush them down the toilet, but he didn’t. “I have a problem,” Lyon wrote. “When someone tells me not to do something I will immediately go out and do it.” When he hung up with his boss, he pulled out the bottles and stared at them.

“The labels were pathetically generic and looked like they’d been created on a typewriter,” he wrote. “The originating pharmacies were located in Florida, Arizona, and Colorado, and the addresses felt strangely cold: for some reason the phrase “Florida Drive” just screams unmarked storefront with the blinds closed shut, located in a partially deserted strip mall, an empty soda can rattling by, pushed by the wind.”

He studied the huge Vicodin bottle and the compacted horse pills inside, and then he took three. “That night I drifted in and out of sleep, but not in an unpleasant, restless way,
he wrote. “It was more like a constant waking dream, and when the alarm went off the next morning I still felt a little high, but not at all hungover. That was all it took to seal the deal—I’d discovered my perfect drug.”

Excerpts are from Pill Head: The Secret Life of a Painkiller Addict by Joshua Lyon. Copyright 2009 Joshua Lyon. Published by Hyperion. All Rights Reserved.