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...

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