Funding for Tragedy and Hope: Stories of Painkiller Addiction has been provided by: ...who is committed to healthy changes in our community.

And by: ♪ Prescription pills are floating around high schools like pencils and textbooks.

Even though you may try and get away from it, in your sleep, it will speak to you.

Every 19 minutes in this country, we lose a person to opiates.

♪ Once known as the quiet epidemic, painkiller addiction is taking the lives of our young people.

When I was 15, that was the first time I ever tried opiates.

It was a Lortab that my friend offered me.

In my head, they were having a good time, so I was like, "Well, I might as well join the party."

I didn't realize what a can of worms I was opening.

♪ Addiction affects all types of families from every corner of society.

No one is immune.

You know, you don't wake up one day and you have a kid who is an addict.

This sneaks into your family very quietly.

Everything that makes you you and makes you unique, it'll take it, and it doesn't care.

♪ On your marks, get set, go.

One hundred and thirty-five-- Two hundred and thirty-five dollars.

Roll again.

♪ Just like I fell in love with the feeling of weed, I fell in love with the feeling of the pills as soon as I did it.

I was 12.

♪ Well, I started off with the hydrocodones, the little ones that my friends would get from their grandparents or their moms or something.

The painkillers you would normally get for, you know, you get surgery done or, you know, something like that.

Your teeth or something with the dentist, you get those.

And then I started moving onto the Opanas, and I eventually couldn't find it, it became scarce, they stopped selling it, and so I moved onto heroin.

Ten years ago, parents were concerned about weed, they were concerned about alcohol, and what parents aren't even aware of now is that their kids are taking pharmaceuticals, passing them around between each other, and unknowingly, kids are building tolerances, and when those tolerances grow high enough and then they don't have the pharmaceutical, their body gives out on them.

We couldn't keep him in the house, we didn't know what else to do, so we went down to the police station to ask Depew Police for some advice what to do 'cause Ryan did punch a hole in the bathroom light socket and did some damage, so we pressed criminal charges against him.

By then, it was-- I wouldn't say it was too late, but it was a reality.

The reality set in, it was like, this kid is, uh, he's out of control.

He was just a baby, too, I mean, he was only 14.

For the first week or so, I actually really looked at it in such a positive way, but then my addicted side came over and said, "What the hell are you doing here?

You need to go get high.

Just leave, you're gonna end up using anyways."

And like I said, the war zone, kind of like your good conscience-bad conscience, "Should I go get high?"

"No, I don't need to get high, but it'll make me feel better."

The reason why is because these chemicals are so close to our natural chemicals, our natural endorphins, our natural dopamine, till it doesn't realize this is a pseudo one, so it shuts down the natural release of the chemical, and it starts-- now your body is not releasing any, it's really begging for that drug to come.

I was sitting in my cell.

I kind of took a step back and said, "What the hell am I doing," you know?

"I'm sitting in a jail cell staring at barbed wire fences, just thinking about getting high every day, it's crushing my family," and at that point, I think I really accepted what the hell I did to my family and really looked at it.

♪ Years ago, marijuana, you could smell marijuana.

Alcohol, obviously.

These are little, tiny pills.

These things are very easy to conceal.

No matter where you are-- the city, out in the suburbs, private school, public school-- prescription pills are prescribed by doctors everywhere, so you can't go somewhere where it's not gonna be out there.

There is a one-in-four chance of a teenager misusing or abusing prescription painkillers.

Addiction happens in the gas pedal part of the brain, the accelerator, and young people are go, go, go, and so forth, and they lack the ability, often, to assess risk and predict long-term consequences.

So, their braking system of their brain, the part of the brain that says, "Don't do that, you idiot," that's not wired up yet.

The pills kid are taking you may have in your own medicine cabinet.

The most common group used by teens are opiate painkillers.

These are drugs like: The next group is benzodiazepines.

These are drugs like: These are things that many people get for, "Oh, I'm scared of flying."

"I go throughout my day and I'm anxious and I breathe a little bit, or I need something to help me go to sleep at night."

It's not hard to be prescribed them, so then all of a sudden, they float in your house.

In the last 20 years, prescription drug-related deaths have increased 400 percent.

In the same time, prescriptions written for these medications have increased at the same rate, and it's killing our young people.

As parents, it's a very different world, and we have to educate ourselves more so than we ever did.

We have to educate ourselves as to what is going on, and we have to be little detectives and look for this.

Addiction knows no gender, it knows no-- it doesn't matter about economic, where you are economically, it doesn't matter the status of your family.

Addiction has-- doesn't discriminate, is the best way to put that.

I don't think that everybody who needs to has come together to realize just how massive this epidemic is, and it is massive, and it's going to get worse.

♪ ♪ ♪ I was using cocaine to get through school.

♪ I had managed to quit using cocaine but had picked up using opiates.

♪ The opiate of choice for me was Lortabs, hydrocodone generically.

And that's where the addiction really began to opiates for me.

♪ A good student with a close-knit family, Teresa coped with the stress of school, being a single mother, and holding down a job by using prescription drugs.

I was becoming severely addicted to the point where I would become sick if I didn't have any pills to get me through my day or to get me out of bed, and then it was just by circumstance, I ended up getting a job at a doctor's office, and this doctor, I noticed, was, you know, what a lot of people call a candy-shop doctor.

I started to see these people come in and out and in and out with all these prescriptions for painkillers and muscle relaxers and anxiety meds and all this stuff, and meanwhile, I'm getting my own prescriptions for, you know, to feed my addiction, because I knew this doctor was good for that.

Well, in terms of who to blame for this current epidemic of addiction, there is certainly enough blame to go around, so, you know, people want to take these pills, so they come to the doctor and ask for them.

Pharmaceutical companies promote these drugs, doctors prescribe them, society accepts them, insurance companies will pay for them, so, you know, it's just everywhere.

So, to deal with an epidemic like this requires changes in a whole range of things.

Feel how warm it is on the top.

Ooh, and it's freezing on the bottom.

I ended up leaving my child.

You know, I ended up leaving my family.

I ended up homeless a few times.

I've ended up incarcerated.

I've ended up in crisis centers.

I've landed in the hospital a few times.

Once a drug is in them, they have no control at that point.

The brain is now not sending clear messages to the body.

They absolutely don't have any ability to make a sound decision.

All the morals and all the things that I was taught as a child, it took all of that right out of me.

I can either, you know, get treatment, get help, and actually do this and get my life together, or I can keep going the way I'm going and end up, you know, in jail or in some kind of institution, or I eventually would die from addiction.

♪ Death.

People can die.

Addiction is a chronic illness.

People have left treatment, hooked up with people who were not ready to quit using, and have died.

People don't understand that when you go into treatment and you have time and distance away from the drug, the heart is not the same.

It can't take the same.

You may have came in using 15 bags, but you can't leave treatment and use 15 bags.

It is lethal.

Addiction is lethal, and that's why I fight addiction with everything I know how.

And I say it to people all the time.

Where do you rank yourself in the fight?

He would be the kid at the playground that would walk up to other children and say, "Hi, my name is Michael, let's play."

Always laughing.

Always the clown, but not in an obnoxious way; in a silly, fun way.

♪ At 12 years of age, Michael was diagnosed with Crohn's, an inflammatory bowel disease.

It can be incredibly painful.

As much as he wanted to be normal and fit in with the rest of the gang, he had limitations because of the disease.

♪ Michael would do hobbies and tasks that he could control and do by himself.

Michael, never once, he never once said, "Why me?"

He just took it.

He refused to acknowledge that he had a disease.

He said, "I have a condition."

When Michael turned 18 and began seeing a general practitioner, things started to change.

For pain, he was prescribed opiates.

Now, physicians, there are probably physicians that we used to under-prescribe and under-treat pain.

Now, perhaps as a group, we tend to over-prescribe.

He would get hydrocodone from one doctor, Xanax from another doctor, and Cymbalta from a third doctor.

Okay, none of them talked to each other.

So, it was one of those, "Take this medication and come see me in two weeks."

All this to an 18-year-old that-- his brain is not fully developed.

I could see Michael's personality changing.

I could see him-- He was-- It's all right, take your time.

I need a minute.

♪ ♪ He was no longer the happy, care-free young man that we knew.

We were never sure if that was the Crohn's or the medicine until he came out and said in December of 2010, "Pops, I have problems."

♪ It wasn't very long for Michael.

It was six months from the point of saying, "I'm addicted," to the point where he took his life.

From December of 2010 to June 4th of 2011.

June 4th at 10:05, Michael was gone.

♪ Our people think of it as a shame and they don't want to go through that pain of shame of "My son is addicted."

Well, I'll tell you what.

That pain, that shame, is a lot less compared to the pain of losing a child.

I should have, um, I should have grabbed my son at that moment and gave him a hug and said, "You know what?

This is our fight.

We're gonna do something about it."

♪ I'll tell you how kids use opiates.

Ninety percent of kids will use an opiate the way that you use a pill.

After that, they'll realize, "This feels great, but I'm needing to take more of the same pill to feel that first effect, so instead of maybe climbing the charts on a stronger one, I'll crush these up and then I'll sniff them because I'm less scared of sniffing them now that I've seen other people do it."

And then the inevitable happens that every kid swears they'll never do.

One day, they don't have the pills to swallow, they can't sniff enough because their tolerance is high or they cannot afford it, and then a friend says to them, "Heroin is ten times cheaper and gets you ten times higher," and then the kid responds, "I have a fear of needles."

That's when the kid covers their eyes, gives their arm to their friend, and says, "You do it the first time."

After that, they take their arm back and they shoot up every time fully in love with the needle."

How much do I owe you for the ice cream, Miss?

Two.

Go.

Now, all of our wishes are gonna come true.

"I love sailing in a ocean."

♪ I was 17.

It was a Lortab that my friend offered me.

Growing up, it was hard.

Both parents were drinking.

My oldest sister was-- she's the one that started on the Lortabs.

Then it was my brother.

Then it was me.

They made me feel good.

They--I had a lot of energy, I would constantly be getting my work done quick, cleaning, I would be doing more than I was supposed to do.

Brandie used prescription and other illicit drugs until she found herself pregnant at the age of 20.

She stayed clean throughout her entire pregnancy, but then was sent home with another prescription for Lortab.

They sat in my cupboard for a few days.

Then I started getting the postpartum depression.

Everything else that I was just upset about, and I said, "Well, they made me feel good before, so let me try 'em again."

Wee.

Love you.

I love you.

Her addicted side quickly took hold and overpowered the love she had for her child.

I would go to the hospital and pretend I was in pain to get shots of Dilaudid.

It was easy.

They didn't really check to see if you were hurt or anything, it just-- you told them what was going on.

Here's a script, here's a script, here's a script, and it's easy to get 'em.

I ended up getting up to take 50 to 60 10s a day.

The Lortab 10s.

I was spending my whole paycheck, my kid's father's whole paycheck.

We weren't paying our rent.

I went into rehab, I got cleaned up, I was clean for a while.

I got pregnant with my second daughter.

Brandie started taking Suboxone, an opiate replacement designed to help you stay clean.

My second daughter came out withdrawing from them.

She almost had to get put on methadone to recover from the withdrawals that she was going through.

That was the worst feeling in the world.

That really was.

To know that it's because of me that she's going through that, that she was in that pain, I felt like, this big.

It was horrible.

One of the things that Brandie has continuously said motivates her is her relationship with her children, and that comes from insight where she can compare and contrast who she is and was as a mother.

Night-night time, time to go sleepies.

When she looked at herself in the mirror, she would tell you, and she's cried through saying this, "I didn't feel like a good mom."

Here you go.

Night-night.

I wanted to get clean, but I wasn't 100 percent ready.

My oldest daughter came to me when I was laying in the bed one day.

She said, "Mommy, don't you love us anymore?

Why don't you ever play with us?"

That right there broke my heart, and I knew that she's getting older now, she sees what's really going on, and I had to do something about it.

♪ What these drugs do is reprogram our brain.

There's a part of our brain that's on autopilot.

We don't have to think about how much water to drink.

When we're thirsty, we drink water, and when we're not, we don't.

Our brain just automatically tells us when it's time to drink water.

In ten percent of the people, these drugs have the ability to take over that autopilot brain and make the brain think it needs drug the way a thirsty man needs water or the way a hungry woman needs food.

That's how it works.

When he was two years old, he was diagnosed with a genetic defect called neurofibromatosis, and between the ages of seven and twelve, Christopher had seven brain surgeries.

♪ In probably his sophomore year, end of sophomore to junior year, he started to experiment with cough medicine, DXM, and I was totally unaware of it.

I reached out to his doctors, and they sent me on to specialists, and Christopher was diagnosed as bipolar, schizophrenic, psychotic, borderline personality disorders.

I mean, there was a whole list of things.

But the worst part of it is that with every diagnosis came a new prescription, and by this time, Christopher was abusing drugs pretty heavily.

Predictably, Christopher's use graduated to heroin.

I was a classic enabler.

You know, protecting him, making sure he got up to go to work, driving him places, giving him money, doing what I thought was best for my child.

Nowadays, your average addict looks like your average person.

Pressed pants, collared shirt, boat shoes, smile, credit cards, in school, at work, but completely dependent on something biochemical to keep their life afloat.

Eventually, Christopher left home and quickly found himself in trouble with the law.

He needed Mom, and Mom said, "You either go into treatment or you can't come home.

I can't help you."

Now, you think that that's gonna be the easy thing.

Now we're talking about treatment.

It's not easy.

It's not easy getting help, it's not easy finding help.

This is Colleen.

Colleen and a few other parents have created a website to assist others on the road to recovery.

Everything is available online if you spend hours upon hours upon hours looking for it, but either you're not aware of what's going on, it's not affecting you yet, or you're in crisis, and you don't have that time to look.

So, we wanted to put all the information that was very important at somebody's fingertips.

A lot of the times, the healthcare industry says, "Okay, you've got a big problem just like everybody else.

You have to start at square one.

Try this version of treatment.

If that doesn't work, try that version of treatment.

If that doesn't work, try this version of treatment."

So, it is so important for people to act sooner than later.

Christopher is now in a transitional house.

He's taking his time, he's embracing his recovery more than he ever has, so I think parents really need to educate themselves because once you're there, it's very hard to get out, but if you can prevent getting there, you know, kids are--they're young, they're impressionable.

Do it when you still have hold.

♪ We have to wake up.

Why aren't we educating?

Why are we allowing some things to go?

Why do we turn a blind eye and a deaf ear?

Stand up and have a voice.

And look, I'm only 15 years old, and look, I was a mess.

I was destroyed.

I would never put my worst enemy through something like that, to be completely honest.

It's just-- that's not-- not the answer.

Recovery is gonna be for the rest of your life.

It's not one day you're all better.

You have to put a lot of work and effort into staying clean.

Being in active addiction, it was living hell.

You know, just daily stressors, I would rather get through that and have that feeling of accomplishment.

How I'm living now outweighs anything that I came from.

I cannot express enough to parents that early, early, early intervention, when you're just thinking that something's going on, something's not right, that's when you need to intervene.

We have to look at it as a disease.

Once we look at it as a disease, just like cancer, just like diabetes, just like heart disease, then we'll start to change.

As a parent, I'm gonna approach it that without question, my kid is gonna be introduced, offered, offered for free, exposed, and I have every responsibility as a man and father to educate my child on it and give him the impression that these things are what they are.

They're fatal, progressive, and they kill.

Get in the fight.

It's not going to disappear unless we do something about it.

Funding for Tragedy and Hope: Stories of Painkiller Addiction has been provided by: ...who is committed to healthy changes in our community.

And by: Captioned by Video Caption Corporation www.vicaps.com