Posted on 12/22/2017 7:34:04 AM PST by cyclotic
At first glance, it looked like Greg Perdue was stretching. The 58-year-old sat cross-legged on the matted wall-to-wall carpet in his Aberdeen, Maryland, apartment, a head of shaggy, graying hair bent toward his knees. But when medical examiners gingerly turned him over, they found his bloated face was a deep purple, his nose and mustache covered with crusted blood. Next to a pack of cigarettes on the kitchen table were three clear pill capsules: two empty, one containing an off-white powder that was later identified as heroin.
After being prescribed painkillers to treat a work injury, he started snorting heroin and became estranged from his friends and family. When the cops found him in April, they determined he’d likely been slumped in his apartment for a couple of days. His was the 113th overdose of the year in Harford County, a white, working-class suburb a half-hour up Interstate 95 from Baltimore. There was no funeral; his ashes sit uncollected at the morgue.
After Perdue’s quiet death, a lanky, affable 38-year-old cop named Brandon Underhill was assigned to investigate the dealer who had sold the fatal dose to Perdue. Underhill, a clean-cut churchgoer who grew out his wavy blond hair and got his ears pierced when he started doing undercover work 10 years ago, quickly zoomed in on a suspect: Zack Carter, a 35-year-old with a rap sheet including several drug charges and an attempted murder. As spring turned to humid summer, he tracked Carter’s cellphone data, talked to “friendlies,” or informants, and met Carter behind the yellow home in J&K Mobile Home Park in Aberdeen, where Carter, whose name I have changed, would lean into Underhill’s car window and exchange glass vials of heroin for cash.
(Excerpt) Read more at motherjones.com ...
I sense a HUGE gap in the sequence of events.
I've been prescribed painkillers following serious injuries and/or surgery) on at least ten different occasions, and I have NEVER snorted heroin (or otherwise ingested it).
And by the way, painkillers do not treat injuries - they temporarily mask the pain from injuries while the body heals. And if the body does not heal then there is something else wrong, and opioid painkillers are not the answer to whatever else is wrong.
This is terrifying to me as the father of teens here in NJ; this stuff is truly everywhere. Even if we can keep our kids clean, the crime that accompanies drug addiction (thefts and murders) may still take a toll.
I’ve been prescribed them too. In bad pain from kidney stones, it amazed me how well Oxycodone worked to make it manageable. I remember commenting that I couldn’t imagine ever taking them if not in pain.
Both of my sons have prescriptions for opioids right now for medical reasons. They never filled them.
For people with legitimate lifelong pain, that can be medically verified, I’m of the opinion that you give them whatever they want.
I have tremendous sympathy for people who get hooked on prescribed medications and sink down into depravity to feed their addiction. I really do.
For people who start off with recreational drugs and get hooked, sucks to be you.
There’s a huge difference with unfortunately the same ultimate outcome.
In addition to the people I know who have OD’d, I also know two young men who have come clean. They still have struggles but are working it out. The fix includes faith in Jesus Christ and his healing along with some excellent counsel and help from others.
I learned recently I have a cousin in rehab for heroin. Upper middle class white suburban upbringing. Graduated from a good college. Parents are together; mom is a schoolteacher and dad is a defense contractor. Churchgoing conservatives.
It wasn't street hoodlums that turned him into a drug addict. It was opiates prescribed by a doctor to treat an injury he received playing sports in high school.
There's something going wrong here.
didn’t read the whole article.
zero sympathy here.
Just don’t do it. If you start, just stop.
Addiction is a character flaw, nothing else.
And stop with the “ My brother was . . . My sister was .. .. “. If you care, help them stop. Can’t stop? G-d’s way of cleansing the planet.
We’ve been through this before. It’s a generational thing. Enough time passes and we forget.
Cocaine at the turn of the last-last century, barbituates in the 40’s and 50’s, heroin in bad old days of the 70’s, the “crack epidemic”.
Drug users, drunks, fat asses, most diabetics; you did it to yourself through bad personal choices.
Where was your caring family then??
That is what makes this different from other drug epidemics; very “normal” people are caught up in it, often starting with exactly what you describe: painkillers for a legitimate injury. Here in NJ there is a lot of pressure on the medical field to stop prescribing so strongly and easily; they are absolutely ruining (or ending) lives to move as many pills as possible. Those doctors today are regarded in the same manner as cigarette advertisers...
Best of luck to your cousin; a difficult habit to kick.
Wow, you must be the embodiment of the second coming, because you must be a perfect specimen in all ways.
I’m glad that you’ll never have to endure any problems in your family.
Perhaps you should break FReeper tradition and actually read the article.
Yes, people are weak, but it doesn’t necessarily have to be a death sentence.
“Both of my sons have prescriptions for opioids right now for medical reasons. They never filled them.”
I had the same situation with an oral surgeon; I refused the prescription but he insisted, because he couldn’t call it in to a pharmacy if I was in pain later. I took the slip and never filled it; I’m already enough of a mess, and don’t need this on top of everything else!
Personally, I’m glad when Freepers post from Mother Jones, Rolling Stone, et al. We need to be well-informed. Lefties tend only to read from their side. I like that we read from all sides.
I have a good friend who’s a recovered junkie. He became a Christian in prison and now helps other addicts through a ministry he and his wife started.
He won’t even take a Tylenol.
That’s great for him if he can be so disciplined; I rarely use Tylenol/Advil, and I believe it makes them very effective when I do use them. Others I know that use them all the time seem to be taking more and more for the same pains...
My ex got hooked on prescriptions.
She was never the same.
A Navyadmiral mourns his son, dead of an overdose in his college dorm room.
No Family Is Safe From This Epidemic
My two boys will be tens before I know it and me two girls won't be far behind them. I struggled with alcohol and smoked cigarettes for years. I've since quit both but I know the addiction bug runs in my family. I worry about it as well.
Here in NJ we had an odd lawsuit where a wealthy family pushed to charge their son’s dealer with murder; I don’t know where that ended up. It really is different than other ones like crack and such - not because of the socio-economic or racial groups impacted, but because it is starting out with prescriptions for legitimate issues.
Good for you with the smoking & drinking, and good luck with the kids!
I agree. If I believe the article will lead to an interesting exchange of dialogue (and isn't that why we're here?) I'll post it, regardless of where it originates.
Lately, many lefty sources have found themselves on the "not welcome at FR" list and that's unfortunate. FReepers used to be smart enough to digest an article on their own and not need to be protected from the scary parts.
How many people get the opiates and do fine? How many do not? Many and not many respectively. The difference is quite often due to the quality of the doctor. The answer to this problem, like every social problem, is caring. Looking after friends and relatives. Talking with doctors, etc. The people who simply want to ban opiates are solving the wrong problem and will create new black market problems.
Not to mention, even the Lefties occasionally say something true. Rolling Stone was one of the first to say this whole Russia story is nonsense, and Politico broke the Obama-Hezbollah story. Rolling Stone also released an entire, unedited transcript of George Zimmerman’s initial call to the police after NBC had edited to make it sound like he was racist. New York Times is now admitting how bad it is in Venezuela. Bill Maher is pretty good on Islam. Piers Morgan defends Trump on a regular basis. I say we take them where we can find them.
For the record, my apology was only a joke. Sometimes lefty’s write some good stuff.
I found a really good Salon article once about the failures of Hillary Clinton's campaign. I formatted it and went to post it only to be greeted by a "Salon is not welcome at Free Republic" message.
Hundreds of Salon articles have been posted here over the years.
So I accidentally "forgot" to include the link to Salon and posted the article anyways. And then I posted "oops forgot link. Here it is" and the mods added it in the heading and allowed the article to remain.
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