Not all addicts share Joe's luck. Russell Vega, the medical examiner for Manatee, Sarasota and DeSoto Counties, says that in 2009 there were 73 accidental prescription drug overdose deaths in Sarasota and 56 in Manatee. According to Hillsborough County's Consumer Protection Agency, two to five deaths involving Oxycodone occur every week. And in Pinellas and Pasco Counties, the number of deaths involving Oxycodone rose more than 400 percent from 2000-2008.
It might have been police intervention that helped Joe and Lynn avoid joining those statistics.
LYNN WAS OUT picking up some pills when she got pulled over. She called Joe from the truck, with the police behind her, running her license. "I've been pulled over," she told Joe. "I've got warrants, but they've been asking me where you are."
Joe, at home on the couch with a prostitute friend named Tia, said, "Well, don't tell them where I am," and lit a cigarette. The pair hung up before the police came back and arrested Lynn.
"I was still smoking the same cigarette when I heard the helicopters. I was like, 'No fucking way, really?' Tia the hooker looked at me, said, 'Good luck man,' and ran out the sliding door into the backyard. ... The chopper kept getting closer. I'm pacing, smoking that cigarette down, just running over in my head. No. Fucking. Way. No. Fucking. Way. It was totally surreal."
When the propellers' whoosh started knocking the palm fronds into the pool cage, the reality became impossible to ignore. SWAT stormed through both the front and back door at the same time and threw Joe to the floor, burning cigarette butt and all.
"They didn't want to touch me with the staph infections and MRSA all over me," Joe says. "My lymph nodes were so swollen from the infection I could barely move my arms. They finally had to link two sets of cuffs together because I couldn't get my arms behind me." The police took him to the Sarasota County jail; they sent him straight to the hospital.
Joe was caught with prescriptions from three doctors and was looking at up to 15 years in prison. The prosecutor and Judge Deno Economou listened to Joe's public defender when he asked the court to give his client one chance to help himself. "The judge actually cussed me out in court," Joe says, "but bless his ornery soul, he gave me a break. He gave me my one chance and I'm not going to waste it. Oh, and without [Narcotics Anonymous] there is no way I could have done this. None." Joe wants to remain anonymous, as N.A. requires, and he is deeply grateful to his sponsor.
In April 2008, Joe pled guilty to fraudulent possession of a blank prescription form and was released with credit for time served. He's been clean since.
Lynn went through her own ordeal. After her arrest in 2008, she received probation. While on probation, she tested positive for opiates and was sent to drug court. In July 2009, at her court date, it was revealed that she was pregnant. She was sentenced to court-ordered methadone treatment. Joe and Lynn's baby, Faith, was born in mid-April. "I've been sick before," Lynn says. "I've gone through withdrawal, all that, but to listen to my newborn baby scream from methadone withdrawal, no other pain in my life has ever come close to that."
Faith is home now, born premature; she's hooked up to a heart and respiratory monitor 24 hours a day. (Some studies report that methadone infants have a higher rate of Sudden Infant Death Syndrome.) Joe looks down at his daughter, all swirls of brown hair, pink blanket, pink jumper and the tiniest most perfect fingers imaginable. Wires run from her small body to a square box on the coffee table.
"My 14-year-old daughter just got out of rehab," Joe says. "Every one of my kids has gotten messed up with pills. And yeah, that's probably my fault, but it's not just my kids. It's not like when I was a kid, a little pot, a little acid. These kids got habits for real. And when it's as easy as calling the number on the back of a newspaper to get drugs, how do we stop that?"
*Not their real names
