Playing With Pain Killers

Newsweek, April, 2001 by Claudia Kalb ( With Joan Raymond, Ellise Pierce, Sam Smith, Jay P. Wagner, Jeanne Gordon-Thomas and Alan Wirzbicki)

It all started innocently enough. Three years ago, when Michelle Brown got pregnant, her doctor wrote her a prescription for Lortab, a potentially addictive painkiller similar to Vicodin, for relief from migraine headaches. Her migraines eventually got worse; the Lortab made her life bearable. But it had a devastating side effect: "Slowly," says Brown, who is from Sanford, Maine, "I started to get addicted." She became a classic "doctor shopper," hopping from one physician to the next to get multiple prescriptions.

She discovered Percocet, and soon she was mixing Lortab with OxyContin, a new, superstrength pain-killer she got through a dealer. By early last year, Brown, 25 years old, and the mother of two small children, worked up the nerve to commit fraud. Pretending to be phoning from her doctor's office, she called her local pharmacy, read her physician's identification number off a prescription bottle and won, she says, "my ...