Pain Killers: Getting off is hard to do...

Archive for June, 2011

Addicted to Painkillers from Back Pain, Herniated Disks and More

Painkiller addiction caused from back pain, herniated disks and Sciatica.

People are always commenting on the blog posts about getting off the painkillers, but what do they do about their back issues they have, that caused the painkiller addiction in the first place?

This is what I did and still do today…

I became addicted to painkillers primarily because of a back pain from an injury I had a few years back. The pain was intense and I tried to deal without taking anything for the pain. After several years of trying to tough it out with the back pain I decided I would try some pain medication. It worked great for a little while, gave me back my mobility and life for a short period of time, but it only covered up the symptoms and didn’t fix the problem.

I had tried physical therapy to no avail, swimming which worked great temporarily and chiropractic. None of them had any long lasting effect on me and I eventually started taking more and more of the painkiller I was prescribed until I was hopelessly addicted.  Eventually I couldn’t do it any longer. The lies, the working my doctors to get more, the going to street dealers for whatever I could get. I finally decided to get help and stop.

One thing had to be dealt with so I wouldn’t go back, and that was the back pain. I had heard on the radio, and see on the web this site called The Healthy Back Institute. I got their free book, which explained a lot but really didn’t give me anything to work with except to buy their program. I was skeptical at first but I kept reading their site and the blog and the more I read the more I learned. I learned that digestive enzymes help with inflammation, and so I went to my local Trader Joes and bought some digestive enzymes for like $3. I ate about 6 of them and my back pain started to go away in about 10-15 minutes after that.

Great so I get some temporary relief from digestive enzymes but I needed lasting relief. I decided to buy their program Lose the Back Pain System which was only $79 for the downloadable version. That was THE BEST INVESTMENT I’ve made for my back EVER! Within 30 minutes of getting their program and watching the videos, I was doing a set of stretches that gave me almost instant relief from the pain that had been plaguing me for years.

I had some questions and they asked me to send them some pictures of my body, standing in front, side and back views. I was then sent a specific set of stretches custom for me, and I have been virtually pain free ever since! These guys are GOOD. I mean real good! They are personable, helpful and will even talk to you on the phone.

I know that sometimes I start to slack and I can feel the problems starting to come back, so I do my stretching routine which takes maybe 15 minutes a day. Almost all back problems can be cured with some form of stretching. These guys have pinpointed and targeted ever know form of back pain to give everyone relief. Low back pain, upper back pain, neck pain, sciatica and herniated disks, they can help with it all. If you’re coming off painkillers and wondering what to do about your back pain that caused all this trouble, check these guys out, I am serious, they can help you.

There’s a free trial AND a 100% money back guarantee, you’ve got nothing to lose. Nothing!

Check out The Healthy Back Institute Today!

PS. my back issues were from a tilted hip issue. I used to be very active and then took a desk job. Sitting at a desk all day caused my muscles to tighten in certain areas and that caused my hips to be tilted forward. Once I started the stretches they gave me I was pain free. I’m still doing the stretches and I’m still pain free after 2+ years.

Leave a Comment

New Oxycontin Is Harder to Abuse

Michael had been snorting OxyContin for five years when a new version of the drug, intended to deter such abuse, hit the market last summer. The reformulated pills are harder to crush, turning instead into a gummy substance that cannot be easily snorted, injected or chewed.

James, 28, of Revere, Mass., at a treatment center in East Boston. He said he started using heroin when OxyContin changed its formula.

Uncrushable Oxycontin

Uncrushable Oxycontin

A blow with a hammer deforms, but won’t crush, the new OxyContin. The original formula could be turned into powder easily.

Instructed by his dealer, Mr. Capece, 21, tried microwaving one of the new pills, then sniffing up the burnt remains. Other addicts have tried to defeat the new formula by freezing, baking or soaking the pills in solvents ranging from soda to acetone. Many are ending up frustrated.

“It’s too much work,” said Mr. Capece who entered a rehab program here last month. “It wasn’t anything I enjoyed.”

A powerful narcotic meant for cancer patients and others with searing pain, OxyContin is designed to slowly release its active ingredient, oxycodone, over 12 hours. But after it was introduced in 1996, drug abusers quickly discovered that chewing an OxyContin tablet — or crushing one and snorting the powder, or injecting it with a needle — produced an instant high as powerful as heroin. It has been blamed for waves of addiction that have ravaged certain regions of the country, and has been a factor in many overdose deaths.

Purdue Pharma, the maker of OxyContin, may have succeeded for now in reducing illicit demand for its reformulated drug. But in several dozen interviews over the last few months, drug abuse experts, law enforcement officials and addicts said the reformulation had only driven up interest for other narcotics.

Demand appears especially high for pure oxycodone pills that come in a 30-milligram dose, often called “Perc 30s” or “Roxies” on the street. Opana, a time-release painkiller similar to OxyContin that has been on the market for five years, is showing up increasingly in police reports and has been blamed for a rash of overdose deaths. And heroin use has jumped sharply in many regions, according to rehab centers and the police.

“It’s just a matter of switching,” said John Burke, commander of the drug task force in Warren County, Ohio, and president of the National Association of Drug Diversion Investigators. “If I’m an addict, I’m going to find a drug that works.”

Mr. Burke said abuse of other oxycodone drugs was already growing before OxyContin was reformulated last August, partly because the other drugs are cheaper and because OxyContin had become harder to find on the street. Many doctors had stopped prescribing it because of its stigma and switched to other oxycodone drugs, Mr. Burke said.

Raymond V. Tamasi, president and chief executive of Gosnold on Cape Cod, a treatment center, said he had noticed that addicts switch initially to the Perc 30s.

“But eventually people make that progression from the pills to what appears to be a more economical high, which is heroin,” Mr. Tamasi said.

Prices vary, but 30-milligram oxycodone tablets generally sell on the street for $20 to $30 each, according to addicts and law enforcement officials. The old OxyContin sold for as much as $80 per 80-milligram pill. Several recovering addicts in Massachusetts said an 80-milligram tablet of the reformulated version, called OxyContin OP, costs about $40.

“You don’t make any money selling the OPs,” said James Moore, 28, who said he stopped selling and snorting OxyContin and moved on to heroin after the new version came out last year.

Mr. Moore, who said he used to snort as many as 10 OxyContin pills daily, was arrested in November for selling heroin and now lives at a halfway house in East Boston. Addicts can still get high from swallowing the new OxyContin pills, he said, but most prefer the immediate rush delivered by snorting or injecting the powder.

Outside of OxyContin, which comes in doses as high as 80 milligrams, the 30-milligram dose is the highest available for oxycodone, which is why addicts covet it.

Some addicts are reporting an even more powerful high from Opana, a time-release opiate painkiller whose active ingredient is oxymorphone. In Louisville, Ky., there have been at least 14 deaths this year involving Opana, according to the Jefferson County coroner’s office.

Purdue Pharma should have reformulated OxyContin sooner, said Steven Tolman, a state senator in Massachusetts who led a commission that investigated OxyContin abuse. The company asked the Food and Drug Administration to approve the new version for sale in November 2007; it won the approval in April 2010. It is the first painkiller reformulated to deter abuse, according to the F.D.A., which is now studying several proposed reformulations of other opiate drugs.

“It should not clear their conscience,” Mr. Tolman said of the change. “These people are scientists. Why didn’t they do this years ago?”

Not everyone is convinced that the days of abusing OxyContin are over. The F.D.A. is requiring Purdue Pharma to conduct clinical trials before it can claim that the new version is less abuse-prone. Though many addicts appear frustrated by the reformulation, Dr. Mark Publicker, an addiction medicine specialist at Mercy Recovery Center in Westbrook, Me., said he was “absolutely certain” that people would figure out how to abuse the new OxyContin.

“I like to think of them as drug addict scientists in white lab coats,” he said, pointing to Web sites where drug abusers debate various ways of trying to defeat the new formulation.

Libby Holman, a Purdue Pharma spokeswoman, said that based on initial data and reports, the company is “cautiously optimistic” that the reformulation will eventually prove less susceptible to abuse. But long-term studies will be necessary, she said in an e-mail, adding, “It is still too early to make any conclusions about the product’s impact on abuse and misuse in real-world settings.”

The company has initiated eight epidemiological studies and will report updates to the F.D.A., which approved their design, Ms. Holman said. Meanwhile, the new OxyContin pills have won some unflattering nicknames, said Dr. Ronald Bugaoan, director of psychiatric services at the High Point Treatment Center in Brockton.

“They call them gummies because when you chew them up they get stuck between your teeth,” he said. “They call them jellynoses because when you try to snort it up they get stuck. They cake in the nose.”

Mr. Moore, the recovering addict in East Boston, said that it was possible to snort the new OxyContin but that it took about an hour to break it down.

“It’s like doing a science project,” he said, “sitting there with a scraper, a knife, a razor blade, like it’s a frog or something.”

Leave a Comment

Heroin Becomes The Backup To Painkillers

Just a few days before her graduation in 2008 from a Long Island high school, cheerleader and National Honor Society member Natalie Ciappa died. She overdosed on heroin. The sad fact is that Natalie’s death is not an isolated incident and the Internet is filled with stories of users, both young and old, who’ve died from heroin overdoses.

Even more surprising as Natalie’s story illustrates, the majority of today’s heroin users are white, middle-class suburbanites. It is this audience that heroin traffickers are seeking. As evidenced by recent seizures across Tennessee, this state is becoming a prime target for Mexican drug organizations hoping to increase their profits. And Tennessee isn’t the only state in the union they are working on.

The Tennessee General Assembly has recently passed legislation providing additional tools for law enforcement to investigate and prosecute doctor shopping and prescription drug fraud. The increased focus on these crimes and the aggressive pursuit prosecution of these cases involving the abuse of prescription drugs, addicted users are finding it more difficult and way more expensive to feed their addictions to Oxycontin and other painkillers. From the addict’s perspective, the solution to the diminished supply is a less expensive, more readily available alternative. That alternative is heroin.

Many think heroin is ‘no big deal’

According to the DEA based in Nashville, heroin flows into Middle Tennessee from Mexico through the Southwestern states to Tennessee. Due to this availability, the street cost to an addict is relatively cheap. Traffickers find willing consumers for their illegal goods by soliciting addicts near methadone clinics. Selling to addicts leaving these clinics helps the traffickers to generate an expanding client base. As a cheaper alternative to prescription drugs, business is good.

Soliciting clients near methadone clinics is not the only available venue for these heroin dealers. With a seizure of $90,000 worth of heroin in Brentwood earlier this year and another $500,000 heroin confiscation in Dickson County, law enforcement agencies in Metro Nashville’s suburban areas are on alert. The availability of heroin, as well as its relatively low cost when compared to illegally obtained prescription drugs, makes it an appealing alternative to the middle-class, both young and old. In fact, as noted by Robbie Woliver in a 2010 article for Psychology Today, many teens believe that heroin use is “no big deal.”

This cavalier belief by our young people is music to the ears of the Mexican drug organizations. These young people are creating a new generation of heroin addicts. No longer is the stereotypical heroin user viewed as a junkie living on the outskirts of society. Instead, as the availability of heroin increases in our communities, the heroin addict may live next door.

With the majority of heroin coming into Tennessee on our interstate system, law enforcement must continue its interdiction programs on Tennessee highways. In addition, police agencies must work together to identify and stop the flow of heroin into our communities. District attorneys must vigorously pursue prosecutions. And with so many young people now using heroin, educators and parents must be vigilant in monitoring the activities of these young people. Only with a combined community approach, can Tennessee stop the flow of heroin into our state.

Comments (4)