The most dangerous drug to hit small-town America since crack cocaine?
By Seamus McGraw
OxyContin was supposed to be a miracle -- the strongest, safest prescription painkiller ever. But when some junkies found out that its rush could rival pure heroin's, an epidemic was born. Talk to the addicts, hear the tales of teenage drugstore cowboys and old ladies getting jacked for their stash, and the "miracle drug" sounds anything but wonderful. Here's what went wrong. SPIN July 2001
Nana was dying. With every jagged breath, it seemed the cancer that began in the old woman's breast was spreading throughout her body. For the excruciating pain, there were pills on the nightstand, 40-milligram OxyContins. Just one dose, the doctor said, and she'd feel some relief for up to 12 hours. She might even sleep.
Groggy and withered, Nana looked imploringly at Peggy, her dark-haired 17-year-old granddaughter who was sitting beside the bed, nervously twisting a strand of her dark hair between two fingers. If Nana had the strength to speak, she'd have asked Peggy for something to dull the suffering, one of those little miracle pills, the Oxys.
Not that her request would have done much good. Peggy had, of late, turned a deaf ear to her grandmother. She had her own problems - she needed the pills, too. Without them, she'd vomit and shake and get so weak she could barely sit up. Maybe they could share one, Peggy thought. Cut it in half, give Nana part, then crush and snort the other half. She'd done that before. But the cravings came stronger now. So Peggy reached into her pocket and pulled out a brightly colored plastic tube. She shook out a mini M&M, and placed it under the dying woman's tongue. "She'll never know the difference," Peggy told herself. And off she went, the little white pill snug in her palm.
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"It wasn't supposed to be like this," says Dr. J. David Haddox, the medical director for the Connecticut-based pharmaceutical giant Purdue Pharma, maker of MSContin . Five years ago, when the company first announced news of OxyContin, it was hailed as one of their greatest breakthroughs. It was said to be the most powerful painkiller on the market, designed to give relief to the more than 50 million Americans who suffer from severe chronic pain. It was said to be effective, it was said to be safe. Of the former, everyone still seems to be in agreement. Of the latter, they're far from convinced, which is why Haddox is in such a bad mood, sitting around Reagan National Airport on a March afternoon, waiting for a flight home after a grueling, daylong meeting with the bureaucrats at the federal Food and Drug Administration.
It was Haddox who requested the meeting, in an effort to combat the barrage of concerns, which have, of late, started to sound more like attacks. Over the past 18 months, newspapers, magazines, and local television newscasts have been filled with stories about how Oxycontin - deemed by the government to be as potentially addictive as morphine - has become the recreational drug of choice for thousands of mostly young Americans. And while the increasingly popular medication has been lauded as something of a cure-all for inveterate pain, it has more vehemently been denounced as "hillbilly heroin," "demonic fire," and "the most dangerous drug to hit small-town America since crack cocaine."
In February, the DEA issued a bulletin warning that the number of people treated in emergency rooms for oxycodone (the active ingredient in OxyContin, as well as in Percordan and Tylox) related problems doubled from 3,190 before the release of Oxycontin to 6,429 three years later, the latest year for which figures were available. Nationwide, oxycodone was found in the bloodstream of about 100 people who died of drug overdoses in 2000, though Purdue is quick to point out there is no empirical evidence that OxyContin is to blame. Nevertheless, law enforcement officials are actively seeking harsher penalties for unlawful possession of the drug, along the lines of those recently established for Ecstasy -a drug which, in one of its versions, was linked to only 10 deaths in 2000 (possession of even a small amount of Ecstasy now carries a lengthy jail term). And in Virginia, doctors are circulating petitions asking the FDA to pull the drug from the market, as they did a generation ago with Quaaludes or Talwin (known on the street as "T's" or "Blues"), other prescription drugs that were used a little too recreationally.
"It's reached epidemic proportions," says Dr. Art Van Zee, the Virginia doctor who is leading the fight to recall OxyContin. Because it's a prescription drug with the imprimatur of the FDA, people assume that it's less dangerous than designer drugs processed in some backroom lab. But it's every bit as addictive as heroin or morphine, as the swelling numbers of kids seeking treatment in rehabs across the country will attest to.
"It's caught on in greater numbers than Ive seen in 20 years," says Jay McCloskey, the U.S. attorney for Maine, who made headlines last year when he warned about the emergence of what he saw as a new drug scourge in his home state. (Maine has the highest number of oxycodone abusers, along with West Virginia and Kentucky, largely because its available while illicit narcotics, like heroin, often aren't. Following up on McCloskeys admonition, a major local retail chain recently announced that it will no longer stock the drug after a flurry of cases in which young Oxy addicts stormed into pharmacies and stole the drug at gunpoint. In one small corner of Maine, there were three such robberies in three weeks.)
Haddox is sitting in the airport because the FDA wants to know what Purdue is going to do about the violence, and how theyre going to deal with Peggy and the thousands of other kids like her all over the country. "There's been a lot of hype," Haddox says. "Now, I'm a pain physician, so I have a dog in that fight. But I am just not willing to lay down and say, 'Well, gee, there's drug addicts out there who are abusing this, so lets just take every controlled drug off the market and the rest of you can suck it up.'
"We are very, very hurt by this," he continues. "We feel that our company is being impugned. We feel that an absolutely remarkable drug is being impugned. We feel that the movement to take pain seriously and treat people is being impugned. We don't believe that abusers and people with untreated addiction should dictate medical care for the remainder of the population. I have very little tolerance for people who abuse this substance."
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Peggy Taylor hunches down in her chair, one foot tucked underneath her, the other tracing the outline of a cigarette burn on the faded, beige motel room carpet. She almost disappears inside her oversize black coat, behind her dark brown bangs and the smoke from a bummed Eagle Full Flavor cigarette. When her older brother, Frank, 21, told her that he was going to a cheap motel on the outskirts of Portland, Maine, to meet with a writer to talk about his Oxy addiction, Peggy insisted that she be allowed to come along. She had a story to tell too.
But now she seems nervous, hesitant. Frank is here, though, and that helps. After all, it was Frank who first got Peggy to try the Oxys, more than two years ago. Frank discovered the drug through his old friend Jaimie. The way Frank tells the story, Jaimie's father, a diabetic who had a history of abusing drugs himself, had dropped a crowbar on his foot, mangling one of his toes so badly that it had to be amputated. A doctor had prescribed 20 milligram OxyContin tablets to take the edge off.
"He didn't really like 'em," Frank says. "He took maybe one a day - out of 120 pills, he might have taken 30." Jaime started sharing the rest with Frank, and then they both started sharing with Peggy. She says that's how she came to try almost everything in life, by looking to Frank, four years her senior, as both role model and mentor.
The quintessential kid sister, Peggy relied on Frank when their parents divorced, and when their 20-year-old sister, Missy - who suffered from Down syndrome - died. Frank offered consolation when she got in trouble for repeatedly cutting school and wound up in a vocational program. ("It was one of those schools where they put the bad kids," Peggy says. "But I wasn't really bad.") And it was Frank who Peggy turned to when, at 13, she had a child - her son, Tony - sired by a kid she had gone out with a few times during a brief breakup with her steady boyfriend, Ray Gallant. The baby's father had vanished, but Peggy says she didn't really mind. Her mother helped out while Peggy was at school, and Ray - "the love of my life for, like, eight years" - eventually returned. And of course, Frank was there, too.
"All I wanted was to be like my brother," Peggy says. " I wanted to hang out with his friends. I wanted to do what he was doing." But Frank and his friends werent too creative when it came to providing productive activities. Outside of a few square blocks of yuppified waterfront lined with self-consciously upscale bistros, coffee bars, and antique shops, downtown Portland is an aluminum sided shot-and-beer town which is almost perpetually covered in mist, and even the bars all seem to close early. It's a place where old Dodges with rusted fenders rattle along salt-soaked side streets on their way to Denny's or Dunkin Donuts, where kids gather at the local fluorescent convenience store, grab a Cherry Coke and harass the old lady in the canary yellow sweater who works the night shift. The Oxys made the boredom a little easier to swallow.
"They were great," Peggy says. "It was like, if you're hungry and you take one, you're not hungry anymore. If you're angry and you take one, you're not angry any more. I just kept doing them."
Peggy had never been much of a recreational drug user. Shed smoked some pot, drank a little, but as for pills like Vicodin and Tylox, she says "I'd do 'em if friends had 'em." She never really liked the dull sensation she felt from drugs, but Oxys were a different story. "I'd do an Oxy, and I'd clean the whole house," she says, recalling days when shed blare her mother's old Bad Company discs as she vacuumed herself into a frenzy.
About three months after they started using Oxys, Frank moved out and began haunting the streets of Munjoy Hill, a fading Victorian neighborhood overlooking the harbor where the majority of Portland's junkies congregate. A 21-year-old mason earning good money in the booming economy of the late '90s, Frank found himself trading his hard-earned cash for a bag full of pills. When he first started snorting the drug, he had $32,000 in the bank. "I spent it all on Oxys," he says.
Peggy and Jaimie were less adventurous, just trying to get by on the pills left over from Jaimes old man's prescription. They'd hole up, usually at Peggy's house, listen to Korn or Limp Bizkit, crush the Oxys into a fine powder, and snort it though a dollar bill. (To this day, every time she smells money, Peggy says she thinks of getting high.) Their all-night, Oxy-fueled cleaning binges became so commonplace that Peggy says her mother came to think of them as just one of her daughter's personality quirks. But those 90 or so pills only went so far.
"When the prescription ran out, I'd be sick, and I'd wonder why," Peggy says. "I was 16, I didn't have the money for this. I'd ask my dad for money and tell him not to tell my mom, I'd ask my mom for money and tell her not to tell my dad. I'd ask Frank for money and tell him not to tell my mom or my dad. I'd be broke one day, the next day I'd have $250, and in an hour it would be gone" - traded to a friend, who had a friend, who knew some guy up on Munjoy Hill.
Pretty soon, Peggy was flunking out of high school, and her boyfriend Ray was growing tired of playing second fiddle to her pills. "I'm a pretty focused person," says Ray, now 21, and working as a mason in Portland. "But with her, it was all day every day. Shed come home and she'd be really out of it."
Finally, Ray walked out. Then Jaimie did, too. "He wanted to be my boyfriend," Peggy says. But she was hoping that Ray would return. "I told [Jaimie] I had a boyfriend, and he left." Soon after, Peggy got caught rifling through her aunt's medicine cabinet in a frantic search for something to help her get through an Oxy drought. Now her mother was suspicious. The money dried up. "I was like, I'm gonna quit," Peggy says. "I didn't have a job, I didn't have any money, and the sickness was becoming a more regular thing."
And just when it seemed like things couldn't get any darker, Peggy says she caught a break.
"Nana got cancer and they started giving her stuff," she says. The old woman moved in with Peggy, her son, and her mother, so they could care for her. "And I kept telling my mom, 'Try to get the Oxys.' My mom's like, 'Screw you, I'm not getting you pills.'" But finally, moved by the old woman's suffering, she relented.
"They would leave the medicine for her, and I would split 'em in half, give her half, give me one," Peggy says. "Sometimes I would give her mini-M&M's and tell her they were pills." Peggy even got an unexpected bonus when her grandmother had an adverse reaction to the 80-milligram pills. The doctor reduced her dosage to 40 milligrams, and ordered Peggy to dispose of the remaining 80s. She did, of course, but not the way the doctor had expected.
She'd retreat to a corner of her house and snort. Sometimes, she'd share them with her friends, Chrissy and Nicole. That's the way it is with OxyContins, she says. It's not a party pill, you don't snort one and go out. You just groove, usually alone or with a couple of close friends. It's a drug for people who really have no place to go.
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It was in the suburbs of Maine, not far from the neighborhood where Peggy grew up, where the first reports of hard-core OxyContin abuse surfaced in late 1996 or early 1997. "It started turning up in packs" - the packages of prescription drugs heroin addicts mix to get the most out of their heroin highs- says 40-year-old Sgt. Scott Pelletier of the Maine Drug Enforcement Administration. And so it was the heroin addicts, the guys and girls up on Munjoy Hill, who were the first to realize OxyContin's potential.
"The junkies always know what's coming long before we do," says Pelletier. They knew that OxyContin was the perfect drug to get them through the lean times that often come in Portland, when little or no heroin makes its way north from Boston, or when the stuff that comes through is so diluted as to be almost worthless. "They probably knew as much about OxyContin as the guys who made it, and probably more than most of the doctors who prescribed it."
Michael certainly did. Sitting in a molded blue plastic chair in a paneled meeting room at the prison that will be his home for the next seven years, he says he doesn't want his real name used. Michael is a two-time convicted drug dealer, caught last summer with one of the largest caches of heroin and OxyContin in the history of Maine. But there are still a lot of things that prosecutors don't know about him, and he says he'd like to keep it that way.
Looking at him now, with the sleeves of his prison-issue sweatshirt pulled back to expose his sculpted forearms, its easy to see him as an ex-jock, a one-time star high school athlete. It's easy to imagine him playing in a park somewhere with his eight-year-old daughter. It's harder to imagine that he's become one of the area's most notorious cautionary tales.
Michael is the kind of guy who can quote the Physician's Desk Reference by chapter and verse. He knows that oxycodone stimulates the brain's opioid receptors to release a feeling of absolute bliss, a feeling that, according to DEA documents, has been judged to be "greater than an equivalent dose of morphine in opiate substance abusers." He had sampled it in Percodans and in Tylox, and had approximated it with Vicodin, a less-powerful drug that gives a similar, but far less intense high and relies on hydrocodone for its punch But nothing in his experience prepared him for the first time he tried OxyContin - almost pure oxycodone tempered only with an easily removed time-release coating.
It was the winter of 1997, Michael was in his late twenties. He was a convicted heroin dealer who had been released early from the Maine Correction Center, a red brick minimum security prison that sits across the road from an old horse farm on the outskirts of Portland. When he got out, the flow of heroin into Bangor had been temporarily disrupted. It's one of those things that happens from time to time in Maine, when the cops get lucky, or the big dealers in Boston or New York decide that running drugs up the Massachusetts turnpike doesn't make good fiscal sense, that the market's too small to justify the risk. At first, Michael tried to get by with Percocets or the occasional Tylox. Then one of the regulars at the bar gave him a pair of 80 milligram Oxys.
He ate one and snorted the other. He didn't expect much. "I was used to eating 15 Percs at a time," he says. "But this was the strongest thing I'd ever done. It was almost as if they were geared to junkies. So small. So strong. So easy." Almost 12 hours after he dropped those first two Oxys, Michael was sitting in the passenger seat of a friend's car, a steady sweat pouring off of him, his head hanging out the car window in a stiff Maine winter wind. "I was in love," he says.
Within two years, Michael would be back in prison, serving eight years for trafficking after getting caught with a gym bag full of 1,000 packets of heroin and a cache of OxyContin. He's since become something of an underground legend to the kids on the streets of Bangor and Portland, kids like Peggy and Frank and Jaimie, who can recite the details of his arrest from memory - "like the biggest bust ever," Peggy recalls. To them, guys like Michael were junkie pioneers, bold explorers searching out sources for OxyContin at a time when most people had never heard of it.
But Purdue Pharma was taking care of that.
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In 1997, the pharmaceutical company - which had enjoyed great success with its other powerful painkiller, MScontin - had mounted an aggressive marketing campaign, particularly in Maine, Kentucky, and West Virginia. Company salesman feted local doctors willing to prescribe the new drug, and Purdue flew them to Florida, lodged them in upscale hotels, and arranged for them to attend seminars that took the theory and practice of persuasion to new heights. To Haddox, the push to convince doctors of OxyContins unquestioned value was absolutely appropriate. To Dr. Zee, the Virginia physician, it was a study in excess. No narcotic in memory has ever been marketed this aggressively, Zee says.
It was, by all means, an aggressive campaign, a campaign that was designed woo doctors, who might find so powerful an opioid useful. But even McCloskey concedes that the campaign was in keeping with the current trend in the industry to hawk new drugs as loudly as possible, to both doctors and would-be patients.
As Haddox puts it: "Our sales people are assertive, absolutely. But they are told over and over and over again in their training that you are to ...promote this drug...in accordance with all FDA rules. And...if you don't , we will discipline you or we will fire you."
Still it took a while for physicians, who had been happily prescribing less powerful drugs like Percocet and Vicodin for years, to get comfortable with the new drug. It would still be several months before they began prescribing it in earnest, and that meant that junkies like Michael had to be enterprising. Or bold. Or both.
Some took the direct route. They'd hit a pharmacy, sometimes brandishing a weapon, demanding that the frightened clerk hand over just the OxyContin. Others took a subtler approach, scanning newspaper obituaries like a treasure map, looking for the names of people who had "died after a long illness," the time-honored newspaper euphemism for cancer. Then they'd break into their homes.
Michael used a different technique. "There was this older woman, she lived in our apartment complex and everybody knew she had cancer," he says. Her doctor had prescribed Oxys for her. Ten milligrams at first. Then 20. Then 40. She was a great resource. "They give people like her as much as they want."
The goal was to convince the woman to give up her pills for a dollar apiece; then Michael would sell them on the street at an extreme markup, keeping a healthy stash for himself. "At first, her reaction was shock," he recalls. "She said, 'I don't do that sort of thing.' And then she started hearing about the money." Michael's eyes narrow just a bit as he remembers his stellar salesmanship. "It took a while to wear her down. Of course, you're not going to tell her that you're getting a dollar a milligram on the street."
There are stories, confirmed by police and prosecutors in Maine, of retired men and women, people who were living from Social Security check to Social Security check, who did pretty well for themselves selling their prescriptions. One old man bought a house on the profits from his prescription. Another, whose wife was dying of cancer, swapped her pills for enough money to buy a new truck and take a vacation. Then there was the woman, who, at the end of her life, netted $8,000 a week selling her scripts on the street. And the old lady Michael approached eventually came around, too.
At one point, Michael remembers, he coached her on all the right things to say to her doctor to persuade him to increase her dosage from 40 milligrams to 80. "When I'm using," he says. "I have no conscience at all."
By the time Michael made it back to Portland in early 1998, the drug's recreational potential was no longer the happy little secret of the city's 1,700 active junkies. Peggy and Frank Taylor, Jaimie, and an army of other mostly white kids from the dismal suburbs were looking for the little white pills. It was happening all over rural America. Kids had discovered the perfect high for the Internet age, a convenient way to make you feel just fine in your isolation, a drug that provided all the sweet euphoria of heroin without the sketchiness of cut powder or used syringes. High school athletes who swore they would never touch hard drugs were doing Oxys in the back of the bus on the ride home from away games. Honor students were swallowing 40's and 60's the way some people pop Altoids. And they were turning up in treatment centers and methadone clinics, alongside the old-fashoned heroin addicts, still swearing "I'm not a junkie," says drug counselor Gerard Pepin, a recovering heroin addict himself.
"These younger guys, they're drawn to it in big numbers, because they think, hey, it's safe, they're pharmaceuticals," Michael says. "The sad thing is, heroin is cleaner. You do Oxys and the next day you feel like you've had the shit kicked out of you. But it's the drug of choice now. It's an epidemic."
It was an epidemic that caught Purdue Pharma completely off guard, Haddox admits. For ten years, Haddox says, the company had been marketing MSContin, a powerful morphine based drug, that would have been every bit as easy to abuse as OxyContin, "and there were miminal reports of abuse of that product." Purdue executives said they had every reason to believe that abusers would greet OxyContin with the same bored shrug.
But within 18 months of its release, reports of abuse started to surface, first out of Maine, and then in other far flung and remote reaches of the country. "When all of a sudden, people began abusing OxyContin, it struck us as odd. We were surprised by that," Haddox says. The company started working with law enforcement officials and doctors to limit the illegal distribution of the drug. They invited officials like McCloskey to address their pain seminars to warn physicians about the dangers. The company started researching ways to make the drug less attractive to addicts, a process they admit will take years.
And in the meantime, the network of abusers was getting sophisticated. Kids were learning how to forge scripts for it, using legitimate prescriptions for lesser drugs, a little bit of White-Out, and a Xerox machine. (Purdue has tried to curtail that by providing tamper proof prescription forms to doctors in several states.) They were trading the pills in school. They were swapping stories in Internet chatrooms about their best highs and trading tips about ways to score the drug. And those tips were paying off. Frank and Peggy Taylor's friends, just like thousands of kids from Alabama to the Canadian border, had learned how to "doctor shop," how to fake an injury convincingly enough to persuade a physician to prescribe OxyContins for them. Then they'd go down the street to the next doctor, and try the same act again. And if that didn't work, they could always turn to guys like Michael.
But Michael and his cronies, guys like Oscar Moore - the 38-year-old self-proclaimed "King of the Portland Junkies" who's known as Junior to his friends on the street - weren't particularly fond of their new, young customers. Sure, there were now enough people clamoring for Oxys to keep the profits coming. But the newcomers were attracting publicity and that in turn made cops and prosecutors sit up and take notice. Arrests for prescription drug abuse in Maine doubled in a single year, largely as a result of OxyContin.
But it wasn't just the publicity that bothered the older junkies. There was something about these kids that was different, Junior says, leaning over the table at the back of his favorite Dunkin Donuts, his weight resting on bony knuckles, "Love" tattooed across one hand, "Hate" across the other. Something about this drug was different, he says, these kids had a weird energy when they were high, more like the boost from crack, minus the crippling paranoia. They also seemed to feel that they were invincible, that they could challenge anyone, and get away with it.
Holding court on the sagging stoop of his apartment building, or staggering down the road for a cup of light and sweet coffee at the Dunkin' Donuts, Junior started noticing a kind of street violence that he had never seen before in Portland. There were beatings, fights, robberies-the kind of frenetic activity that is well beyond the capabilities of the average heroin junkie who is just looking for a place to nod. Cops found themselves in confrontations with the kids, something that almost never happened with the older junkies. Sometimes, Junior would try to lecture the kids, but they weren't impressed by his warnings, his street credentials, his stretches in prison, the tattoos that cover his hands and arms and back and face. They weren't scared off by the track marks on his arms, or by the fact that his 35-year-old brother, Andrew, also an addict, died in August after mixing several powerful narcotics, including OxyContin.
"These kids, they're not like us," Junior says. "They're violent. You can't talk to them. It's crazy, you know, I hear 'em talking. They say, like, 'Wow, I'd like to know what that old lady has in that pharmacy bag. It looks like she's hurting.' I say to 'em, 'Kid, I'll tell you something right now. I catch you grabbing one of these old ladies with a bag coming out of any pharmacy, I'm gonna kick your fucking head in.'"
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It was early in September, 2000, the end of an unusually cold and wet summer in Maine, and Peggy was resting on the couch at her mother's house, nauseous, shaking, too weak to even sit up. Frank was there. He had lost 40 pounds, but she hardly noticed. She knew he was broke, and knew that he had grown tired of spending all his time chasing Oxys, tired of putting up with Junior's icy glare and his blustery verbal assaults. She knew that Frank had decided to quit. It hadn't been easy. Rehab. Relapse. Rehab. Methadone. It took months, but finally it worked. He was done.
But for once in her life, Peggy didn't feel compelled to follow her older brother. Her grandmother had died in June, taking with her the supply of Oxys. Since then, Peggy had been almost constantly ill, and the last thing she wanted to hear was Frank's lecture. "He said, 'You think you got control of yourself?'" Peggy recalls. "And he reached into his pocket and pulled out a single Oxy. 'Take this,' he said. 'If you feel better off of this, then you don't got control of yourself.'"
She crushed the pill and snorted it. She felt better.
It wasn't until then that Peggy finally realized what she had been doing. Her mentor was now clean. Her boyfriend was gone. She lost her driver's license after getting caught speeding while high. She had disappointed her mother, and she dropped out of high school. She had tried to be a good mother to her son - "Well, I didn't take off on him, or anything," she says. But the drug had come first, and by the end of her addiction, after finally agreeing to go to rehab, she reluctantly acknowledged her maternal lapses. But all of that paled in comparison to the pain she says she felt when she finally realized what she had done to her grandmother.
"I was in rehab almost two weeks before I told anyone where I was getting the pills," she said. "That day, I remember I went in and I was crying when I got there. Everyone asked me if I wanted to talk and tell them what was wrong. I told them that I had gotten addicted because I was stealing from my grandmother."
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Less than two weeks after she sat in that seedy motel room with her brother at her side, Peggy is on the telephone. Things are going pretty well, she says. She's taking methadone to ease her cravings. After a lot of stops and starts, she and Ray are officially back together. "I think I always knew that I'd come back, Ray says. But I wanted her to see what it was going to be like without me." They've even settled into a small apartment just outside of Portland, and they got Tony a dog, an ill-mannered husky who likes to rip up the bathroom floor. They've become a real family. The little boy calls Ray "Daddy," and he can tell that his mom is starting to get better.
The three of them plan to head out into the woods of Maine this summer to spend some time with Ray's father. My dad's got a wicked nice place way out in the woods, Ray says. He built it himself. Thats something I'd like to do. Move out of the city, like that. With Peggy. We're pretty tight. We've been through a lot together.
Peggy says she'd like that. Once she knows for sure she's really clean. But that could take some time. She still needs the methadone, and the Oxys still pull at her from time to time. "I used again," she admits. "Once. An Oxy 20. I kept telling them that I needed them to up my [methadone] dose. But nothing happened. So I took an Oxy. It was only once, though."