Mom was in the bedroom on the bed unmoving. Her lips were purple and face pale. Dad tried to shake her awake and, when that failed, he resorted to slapping her awake.
That day, Mom, Mary Loveless-Day, hit rock bottom.
Lucky for her, Dad refused to give up that day. Normalized drug culture in all instances isolates budding addicts like Mom to echo chambers, surrounded only by other addicts and enablers constantly pumping them full of more drugs.
‘Mommy, where are we?’
Addicts attract addicts, especially when their drug addiction requires black market solutions.
EDITOR’S NOTE: This is Part 3 of a series exploring the early wave of the opioid epidemic from Logan Day’s perspective watching his mother’s battle with addictive painkillers.
Mom was only ever physically present. Days Dad worked, Mom usually babysat. The real babysitters were the opiates that controlled her. She would strap my seatbelt on and drag me to opioid-riddled drug dens chasing the next high, commonly the run-down townhome of the man with which she was having an affair.
His room was messy: clothes on the floor, mountains of old food wrappers, black walls with black lights and caged dogs the size of a 4-year-old me. She took me there every chance possible to get her OxyContin fix.
Every time Mom pulled in, all the progress Dad, Grandma or I made in reversing addiction pulled out. His home was her sanctuary of poison, like the 86% of prescription drug abusers who reported they receive drugs from friends, according to the National Center of Drug Abuse Statistics. Addicts surrounding themselves with addicts traps them in a whirlpool of access. Studies from the Valley Forge Medical Center show that friends of addicts are 2.5 times more likely to start abuse.
From corporate offices constantly supplying and marketing down to her inner circle of enablers, Mom had no chance to escape.
In the Crosshairs
Colorado Springs, Colorado – our home – made for an excellent opiate breeding ground. Manufacturers targeted rural doctors who were often less educated in addiction response and more likely to prescribe entire towns. Pharmacies in El Paso County, where Colorado Springs resides, received nearly 100 million total pills from 2006-2014, according to Washington Post reports. Research from Community Impact reporter Wesley Garner showed that in 2010, Montgomery County received 81.2 opioid-base prescriptions per 100 people. Over supplying emerging suburban communities like these created epicenters for the second wave of illegal opioid dealers.
Now Montgomery county sits at the third highest county in Texas for opioid overdose deaths with an additional 833 accidental overdoses reported in 2023, according to the data from Texas Health and Human Services.
Suburban-Rural areas tend to have more working-class jobs, which make ideal customers like with Mom and her Vicodin. Sales reps for Purdue Pharma – manufacturers behind OxyContin – used prescription records to target doctors with already high painkiller prescriptions, hounding them with advertisements and awarding them with cash incentives for pushing Oxy. Legal actions against Purdue brought media attention to opioid addiction, so manufacturers pivoted to exploiting poorer regions more susceptible to addiction and less likely to escape.
Regulations on OxyContin – followed by all opioids – grew in the later 2000s. Thousands of patients lost their prescriptions. Dealers took over from the doctors by reselling prescription OxyContin. Her Vicodin tolerance was increasingly high from her 90-pills-per-month and she was poor. Mom’s circumstances made her a perfect target for drug dealers and manufacturers alike.
Mom was more than hooked though.
Influential
When Mom was too high to drive, her friend picked her up, moving my carseat into theirs. The backseat smelled like the chunks of vomit staining the seats. Garbage littered the floorboard underneath myself and another child, only about two years older, in a carseat just as filthy. Both moms were lost to addiction and fed off each other.
At our Walmart’s hair salon, where they both worked, Mom’s eyes rolled back, and her head bobbed while she cut clients hair. Everyone ignored this because Mom was the boss – another factor in drug abuse. A study published in the National Library of Medicine showed that, generally, those with higher social capital status – lots of influence in a community – are more associated with daily OxyContin use. Mom, as a leader, led her peers to turn a blind eye, if not joining in.
This workplace risk bleeds into student lives, too. According to Student Media’s 2024 burnout report, Caney Creek High School students were at a 25% higher risk to use drugs or alcohol the more hours they worked a week. The study could not determine the exact cause, but results pointed to work environments exposing students to drug and alcohol users. Studies from the Journal of Child Adolescence Behavior further prove that increased time at work led to increased risk of substance use.
Fear of being alone discourage drug-riddled communities in the opioid epidemic from getting clean. A leading factor of the second wave of the opioid epidemic was how normal communities treated illegal drug use, eventually.
Today, those memories are the worst because, deep down, I know Mom’s influence permanently changed that little boy next to me just as she did mine.
Rock bottom
Dad babysat while Mom was missing. Two of her friends called Dad looking for Mom, but when her salon called, he took action. Dad flew to Mom’s “ex”-boyfriend’s place – the same one she brought me to.
I stayed in the car as Dad entered the townhome. I hated that place.
“Where’s Mary?” Dad shouted, loud enough for me to hear inside the car.
He found her in the bedroom, gagging, gurgling and dying – from an overdose on crushed OxyContin she snorted moments earlier.
A fire truck and ambulance pulled in and EMS stabbed her with Narcan. Nothing. Another shot: She gasped awake.
Dad hit the floor, crying in relief, as EMS carried Mom away on a stretcher. Finding mom that day was a miracle thousands of other addicts and families never got.
At the time, extended-release OxyContin tablets could be particularly addictive. Crushing that type of Oxy bypassed its time-release mechanism, releasing 86% all at once. Because the Food and Drug Administration approved the 12-hour release label with minimal study, addicts had access to next-level abuse comparable to heroin. Purdue Pharma knew the dangers and ignored the increasing addiction rates to cash a check.
Mom added to those addiction rates, only stopping when her body gave out. Because she lived for months in a community of disillusioned drug-users, she continued denying her addiction even when EMTs wheeled her out on a stretcher.
Double Whammy of Neglect
A decade after Mom’s near-death experience, opioid overdose rates in Colorado Springs continued to rise: 900% from 2017-2023, according to charts from the Colorado Center for Health and Environmental data.
Roughly $1 billion dollars fund the Food and Drug administration’s state opioid response programs yet $300 million were unused. These programs are meant to fund opioid-use disorder medication like buprenorphine and collect addiction rate data from doctors and patient reports. The U.S. Government Accountability Office said in Dec. 2021 audits, FDA monitoring programs lack initiative, passively relying on voluntary reports from doctors and patients who enable the cycle. But lazy monitoring is one half of the issue.
The other is culture. At some point, families must put their foot down and pull their loved ones out. Studies published on Biomed Central prove that family initiative significantly helped prevent risk of relapse. Mom was isolated in her drug community, ignoring warnings Grandma, Dad and I blasted. She refused to listen – at that point addicts require professional detox in a safe clinic.
Studies posted in the National Library of Medicine show that drug-addicts often come from already struggling families, making detox efforts seem daunting. Those studies also show that stigma around addicts as a lost-cause deter families from even trying to help their loved ones. The most common avoidance factor was shock and mourning; unable to accept the change in their loved ones.
Denial is less painful for families and addicts alike, but confrontation saves lives.
When drugs rob addicts of reason, relationships outside the drug echo chamber must become their voice; forcing addicted loved ones through detox can be life saving.
Standing idle is as good as watching them die. The FDA should support families under addiction pressure rather than collecting them as statistics. A reliable, coordinated and safe government-run treatment center for families and addicts should be a given.
Mary needed that support.
