Prescription Drug
Addiction Story
Prescription drug addiction story Pill Head is the fascinating story of a writer and magazine editor who ordered pain pills online as part of his research for an article. He brought the pills home and then out of curiosity popped three of them into his mouth.
The addiction was almost instantaneous. Lyon said he “fell in love” with Vicodin, enjoying the numbing effect the pills had on his mind and emotions. He later described the experience as similar to walking around in a protective bubble. It felt as if no one could hurt him.
A Heartbreaking Prescription
Drug Addiction Story
His prescription drug addiction story unfolds into a gripping and often excruciating look at addiction from the inside. One of the ironies of a prescription addiction is that Lyon took pills to make him more comfortable in social settings. When he was in a pill cloud, he didn’t care if people rejected him.But as he became more addicted, the pills took over and became his entire life. "Elliott wants desperately to connect with someone so he can feel," Lyon later wrote about one user he interviewed for his book. "He can't connect with someone unless he's on pills, but when he's on pills, he doesn't care about anything. It's a vicious cycle..."¹ Eventually, Lyon realized that he couldn't feel anything - not even grief over the loss of love - unless he was high on opiates.
Pills Replacing Love
At one heartrending point in the book, Lyon wrote about one friend who looked for a boyfriend to solve her problems."...Emily used to tell her shrink that if she could just fall in love, she wouldn't need the pills," Lyon wrote. "Of course that was a lie. Our need for pills made us immune to anything resembling real love. All it did was temporarily fill the void, and when the high wore off, we were the same depressed, pathetic people. She would pick endless at her split ends, and I would stare endlessly at any blank surface I could find."²
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¹Joshua Lyon, Pill Head: The Secret Life of a Painkiller Addict, (New York: Hyperion Press, 2009), 225.
²Pages 226-227.
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