The Opiate X Factor:

(Written sometime in mid to late 2006)  It’s lame but if your board….

I can vent cause….. I can….

How did we get where we are or were at…?

Oxycontin, Vicodin, Norcos, Percocet, Fentanyl; prescribed with the 3 little bears warning on the bottle “Not to much, not to little…just enough to make it just right”.  The problem is that the “just right” amount as we all know becomes “not enough” way to fast. 

Knowing what I know now from my experiences I reflect on things that just were not mentioned to me.  Vicodin… I never really got the whole “vicodin is pretty cool” thing.  I had friends during my High School years that would say “Vicodin is pretty cool, makes you feel all good and it’s great when you drink”…  Didn’t know anyone who got hooked on it or had a problem with it so I never saw any red flags.  Myself, I took a couple vics here and there just cause it was offered and just cause I did… Didn’t do sh*t for me and I just didn’t get it.  I would rather have a beer at the parties and have my fun that way. 

A year after I graduated High School I was out dirt bike riding and broke my arm bad, real bad, almost compound fracture style.  Cause of where the break was, a cast just wouldn’t work.  I was given 2 options, have surgery and screws in my arm or I could lay in bed for 2 weeks and not move an inch while it healed enough so I could put my arm in a sling.  I am very active but I didn’t want the hassle of the surgery so I opted to tough it out and lay in bed.

I was loaded up with as much vicodin as I wanted.  I started out taking 4 10mg vicodin per day…You know the deal, “take one every 4-6 hours or as needed”.  Every time I moved it sucked so 4 a day was just not working.  So I was taking 6…8…10 a day… At the time it was for only the pain, never EVER crossed my mind about how it made me feel mentally.  Really, all it did was kill the pain so to me it was a tool at the time so I could get better.

Fast forward 2 1/2 weeks and I was doing ok pain wise…  I cut back on taking the vicodin to like 2 a day or so.  Then I just stopped taking them all together without a thought given to it…… To make matters worse in addition to my broken arm…. I got the “flu”.  I was sick for about a week and it just sucked; broken arm, can’t really move around much and I got the flu….bad combo

Since you are here on my site, you know what that “flu” was… It was more than likely at the time a small vicodin withdrawal.  Cause my mind and body thought it was the flu,…it felt like the flu….  Never dawned on me till a couple years ago when I got my life back on track what it probably was.

Back to being active, snowboarding, wake boarding, dirt bike riding and so on… Broke a wrist here….a few ribs there….fractured ankle at so and so time…and life goes on.  BUT…  When I had a few accidents in one season, broken ribs and another broken arm (above my wrist)… I was on vicodin for about 2 months solid…and I started to notice that not only was the pain gone but sh*t… It gave me a little energy, a little jump to the day….  You all know the rest of the story. 

Before I got on the oxy and vicodin wagon… I had a couple friends, totally normal guys, good jobs, strong family and a future ahead of them that was wide open.  One of them smoked weed every now and then and one of the people that came by the “once in a while” BBQs mentioned something about putting “opium” on the weed.  To me, when he said the “O” word I just got this weird look on my face.  The first thing that came to mind was “Junky”…. 6 months later my friend had lost everything, wife, family, job… Had another friend go down the same road but both on pills and stronger stuff.  I felt bad when he came by one time…. Just had to turn him away…. He was too far out of his mind to be allowed in my house or around my family.

I kept thinking, “they really f***ed up their lives, by their actions and the choices they made.  This is partially true, but… Both pills and the strong illicit opiates off the streets have the same effect.  My point is… Heroin addicts never “wanted” to be heroin addicts… Society looks down on  people that use heroin as the “shit” of the human world….. Oxy, vicodin, fentanyl or what ever, when addicted is no different than heroin or actually from ALL of the American Medical Association info that you can find online….it seems that the pills and how they are manufactured actually can / will make the addiction factor greater.  Both can lead to death in the end also. Though I have seen people manage to seeminly live an “ok” life and be a functioning addict; it can all come crashing down in the end.  No matter where you get the “X Opiate” of choice from…all of them lead to the same results when abused.  We are all in the same boat when it comes to this opiate shit….

Just rambling…