* * *
Petersen leads his visitor to a small reception office and introduces Richardson, who says that, as a child, he never participated in a psychological evaluation before being prescribed Adderall. This is especially troubling in light of studies that show most adult addicts started using drugs in their teen or tween years. Unwittingly, it seems, the accepted treatment for misbehaving children turned some into misbehaving adult addicts.
“Someone with an addictive personality can be shot down the path to addiction,” says Petersen, himself a former cocaine addict. “When I was in law school, I thought speed was great. But it led me to the next thing to make me feel better: cocaine. Prescription drugs appear so innocuous, so prevalent. But they are a gateway to other drugs.”
Richardson says that by his early high-school years, he was turning to crime to satisfy his unquenchable need for meth. “I had to go to hustling, stealing, lots of different stuff, small stuff at first like surfboards, skateboards and bikes,” he says. “I’d swap those out to dealers in high school for speed. Gradually, as my addiction progressed, I started stealing electronics and burglarizing houses.
“I totally rationalized this. I was feeding a hunger. I was answering a fierce voice. Getting meth, you are very motivated. The motive for me was to feel normal. Nothing could put itself in my way to getting to that.”
When the meth stopped working, Richardson went for that drive with a shotgun riding shotgun.
After the weapon jammed, he picked up the phone and called his “only sober friend.”
The friend met Richardson alongside a pitch-black road and took him home. The next morning, she sat Richardson in front of his home computer with orders to find a treatment center.
Richardson ultimately chose SouthCoast because it was the only local facility he found that banned drug use during detoxification. Many treatment centers, under the strict guidance of physicians, give decreasing doses of an abused drug, or something similar, to ease painful withdrawal symptoms. “It’s harder than jail,” Petersen says of SouthCoast’s drug-free detox.
“I wanted to be made clear in every aspect of my life,” Richardson says. “This was the only treatment center that offered that, plus life skills, personal care, a new way of living.”
Ultimately, he broke his meth addiction.
“The relationship I had with speed was so strong,” he says. “It took a lot of people and a lot of care to stop from finding other habits.”
He no longer wants drugs for anything that ails him, real or imagined. “Medications mask other problems,” Richardson says. “That’s why I picked a program with a holistic center.”
* * *
When an addict phones SouthCoast Recovery for help, he or she is immediately connected with an intake counselor. And if that addict sounds very desperate—as in preparing-to-take-their-own-life-on-a-remote-stretch-of-highway desperate—the intake counselor who usually takes the call is Richardson.
“He’s now our first line of defense,” Petersen says. “He speaks with almost everyone who comes through this facility.”
There is nothing clients can tell Richardson that hasn’t come out of his own mouth, he says. But besides having personal experience to draw upon, he now has a degree in drug-and-alcohol counseling.
To say his life has turned since that frightful night on Highway 8 would be an understatement.
“When I got here, I had no trust, no faith in anyone other than myself,” Richardson says. “I formed a bond with a counselor and learned to trust people. You can get a client sober, but you need to teach them how to live their life again.”
His father is Mormon, but Richardson grew up in his mother’s Catholic Church. Re-establishing his Christian faith became paramount after he got sober. His new life is illustrated with full-color tattoos on his lower right leg. On his shin is a picture of him collapsed in the arms of Jesus Christ. Richardson holds a hammer in one hand and a spike in the other. One side of the same leg has a portrait of Our Lady of Guadalupe, the unofficial patron saint of addicts. Praying hands are depicted on the back of that leg.
“It reminds me of what I am doing here,” he says. “Recovery presented to me a life that is very worth living. It way outweighed a life worth dying.”
Richardson credits SouthCoast with helping him learn to live again, but now he worries other addicts are not getting the message.
“America looks at addiction half-measured,” he says. “No one looks at cancer half-measured. Getting someone [who’s] impaired under control is only half the treatment.
“I see a United States that is in crisis because of these pharmaceutical drugs. I picked a place where they looked at things from the inside out. Once you take away the pills, the problem still exists.”
mcoker@ocweekly.com
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Alan 10/28/2009 9:20:04 AM
A brief note about "Adderall": this is the trade name of an amphetamines product. It consists of four different amphetamines, such as amphetamine sulfate and amphetamine lactate. However, the "sulfate" and the "lactate" parts are NOT important. The only thing that is important is AMPHETAMINE, regardless of which form. 100% of the effects of Adderall are because of its content of amphetamine, NOT the specific forms of the amphetamine (called, chemically, "salts"). You can get the same effects from generic amphetamine (typically dextroamphetamine sulfate) as from Adderall. The company that makes it claims that Adderall works quicker and lasts longer, but this is mostly bullshit. It is really not significant, and in fact plain old generic dextroamphetamine is generally considered superior to the other forms, including the forms in Adderall. (See the en.wikipedia.org writeup on Adderall for details.) Incidentally, the Adderall company, facing patent expiration on Adderall and thus more generic competition, is now heavily pushing its new "Vyvanse" -- another amphetamine product with very dubious if any advantages, and indeed probably MORE side effects than Adderall or other amphetamines, and, of course, a much higher price. More pharmaceutical company bullshit! Don't buy it. Anyway, to return to the main point: Adderall or generic amphetamine makes no difference, except this one big one: The PRICE! Adderall is ridiculously expensive -- typically $1-4 per pill, sometimes even more. This is a total ripoff, since amphetamine is a CHEAP old drug, and the actual cost of 10 or 20 or 30 mgs of it (as in one typical tablet) is negligible, well under a penny. In other words, they ought to sell for, say, $10 or $15 per hundred -- enough to cover the cost of the drug itself (perhaps 10 cents or so) plus all the costs of tableting, bottling, distribution and so forth, with room for the pharmacy's markup. The idea of paying $100 or $200 or even $400 for a dime worth of a cheap old drug is outrageous -- but it happens. It is the greed of the pharmaceutical company combined with the greed of the individual pharmacist that causes this. Pharmacies vary a great deal in pricing, but the producing company also grossly overcharges. Bottom line: INSIST ON THE GENERIC. Even if insurance covers it and you only have a $5 co-pay. Why? Because the health care system of the U.S. is driving the country bankrupt, and super-high drug costs is one of the reasons. This is one way you can make a contribution, however small, to solving the problem of a medical-academic-industrial-pharmaceutical complex that costs the U.S. well over $2 trillion per year (far larger than the military-industrial complex, and far more per capita than any other developed country). Part of the problem is prescriptions that cost $300 for 50-cents worth of a drug. Be part of the solution. End of rant. Be well!