Emergency Rooms Crack Down On Abusers Of Pain Pills [NPR.org]

Samantha Sangenito 6/3/1512:00 PM

Kimberley Enyart was never interested in doing recreational drugs. But then she was in a car accident and her doctor prescribed a powerful opiate for the pain.

"It just would put me off in la-la land, and make me feel better," she says. "I loved it. I loved that high."

When Enyart's prescription ran out she did whatever she could to convince other doctors that she needed more. Eventually, she moved on to dentists.

"I even had two back teeth pulled over it," she says.

Eventually, Enyart ran out of doctors to fool. In the last decade, every state except Missouri has a built a tracking system that lets doctors look up the prescription history of patients they find suspicious. So Enyart went to the last place in town she could still legally get some pills: the emergency room of hospital.

[For more of this story, written by Miles Bryan, go to http://www.npr.org/sections/he...busers-of-pain-pills]

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I wonder this gal's degree of trauma. When I worked at the Cancer Research Lab at U of Mich before med school, I was scalded on my face by an autoclave. It was painful. In the ED they gave me a shot of a narcotic medication and I felt a degree of calm and peace that I had never felt before in my life. At that minute I knew, this is something to avoid completely. I knew that my hx of trauma could be temporarily abated with these meds but I also knew there was no way I was going to use this stuff, I wanted to go to medical school. It is so simple to see how someone severely traumatized in their past after a simple physical trauma (w/a hx of severe psychological trauma) could then later become addicted to these pain medications. They don't just alleviate the pain of an acute physical injury, but they can alleviate the pain of a terrible childhood. My heart goes out to all those who didn't quite see... this was a very dangerous medication at least for me.

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