Drug Dealers- Part 2- "Living Zombies"

It all starts innocently enough. A pain in the back, a tweek in the neck, a muscle pulled here, a bone broken there. Car wrecks, dog bites, gun shots, stabbings, shootings, assaults. Bar fights. Falls. Hundreds of thousands, (or is it millions?) of people depart hospitals and doctors offices every day with pills.

Cancer patients have pill bottles littered everywhere. And cancer patients have caretakers, often family members, who unable to deal with their own fears, become stressed as well. They take the cancer patients pain Meds and become addicts themselves.

A doctor friend of mine told me one of her elderly patients had a hip replacement. Her caretaker, the daughter, stole and swallowed all mom's pain pills.

There are others stressed by anxiety -- from the economy, their marriage, their single-hood, their children, their lack of children, deaths of those they love, the feeling of being unloved.
Compound that with more anxiety and fear.

The economy is not just tanking, it is now drilling into the depths of an economic depression all across this great country of ours.
Fears are soothed, nerves are calmed with Valium or Xanax or anti-depressants, anti-anxieties.
And when that's not available, there's always booze, heroin and Meth.

When the pain is real, from a broken bone, a ruptured disk, a broken neck, a crushed toe, endometriosis, you name it -- what the pain meds do is kill the pain without creating the high.

When the pain is gone... or there is no pain to begin with... the pain killers provide nothing but the high. Between that spectrum of real pain treatment and real pain killer highs, are shades of gray hard for the medical professionals and family members to interpret.

When the anxiety is quelled.... and the nerves are calmed.... it sure beats climbing the walls.
But sometimes, the only way to get over walls IS to climb them.

Therein lies the quandry.
Pain is nature's way of telling us something is wrong with the body.
Stress is nature's way of telling us we are in a situation requiring our fight or flight.
When we are drugged and numbed, we really don't know what is happening and down we go.

ER docs and Family Practioners are now officially on the look-out for "drug seeking behavior". Yet, on the other hand, that "drug seeking behavior" is built into the drugs those same doctors prescribed.

If you have excruciating back pain and the doctor gives you pain pills, then why wouldn't you take them?
And as you continue to take them and you heal... then you start getting high from the pain pills.... why would you stop?
Some people can and do stop. Others can not.
I think like cigarettes, there are addictive elements built into many prescription medications and the world is tilting on its psychological and emotional axis because of this.

As soon as I finish this blog, I will hit the road to work the weekend's cases.
Normally I am gone much sooner than this. I usually take an earlier car ferry, drive off through Edmonds and into Seattle via Aurora Blvd, which was the first real freeway in the area before I-5 came into the picture. Now it's like one of those older bigger roadsm Route 66's, all over America.

I like taking Aurora into Seattle, because it is slow.... the road is spotted with stop lights... which gives me time to chill and look around. Because I investigates so many auto wrecks, I am never in a hurry when I drive. I am always observant, ever vigilant.

Aurora Boulevard which becomes Pacific Highway and International Blvd south depending which way you head, is filled with all kinds of fascinating people in a variety of life forms: good people and bad; sane and crazy; happy and said; bag-laden or empty handed. Some have money, many are homeless. Some people haul their whole lives in garbage bags, while others sip their Staburcks Venti Doubleshot down the road.

There is one area with cheezy wall-to-wall motels the prostitutes and their pimps book by the hour. I enjoy passing those places, I'd confess to an affection for them, because I have been in most of them meeting said prostiutues, pimps, and other random players I need statements or info from. Some of those places are now closed and soon to be, I am told, "gentrified."

I can spot a druggy and hooker a mile a way. I watch the women and men, young and old, black white and every color inbetween, roam the streets of Aurora often. This is where Gary Ridgeway, the most prolific serial killer in the country did his hunting.

I used to represent some of these people who walk these streets when I worked at The Public Defender. In particularly rough areas, there are signs posted on poles and posts that say SODA, (meaning Stay Out of Drug Area.) Or SOPA (Stay out of Prostitution Area.) Most people don't even know those signs exist.

So there is a point to all this. And it ties into Drug Dealers, Aurora Ave and one more subject, Living Zombies.

Because there is a spot I pass, if I hit it just right in the morning, where from out of nowhere, twenty, thirty people, and many more people emerge from everywhere as they begin to gather in small groups and lines to enter a Methadone clinic for their daily dose. It is early in the morning when the gathering starts, 6, 7, 8 am, it varies.

What I do know about this place and places like them all over our country and cities, is that people struggling to get off of hard core drugs just for the high... or prescription drugs because of the pain... are now legally dosed in such clinics daily. Every single day, seven days a week.

Some are dropped off by friends or relatives. Some take the bus. Some come from miles by ferry because there are no Methadone clinics where they live.
Others walk miles with backpacks, or shopping carts, and shoes worn with holes.
They all line up, enter this building and get their dose.

Then they all walk outside, mellow, smiling and expressionless. The Living Zombies hang outside while the high takes hold and form small circles os Zombie cliques. Groups of friends, puff cigarettes, tell stories, laugh, wave their arms, shake, twitter and tweek, high.

I confess. I have seen this often and close up with my binocs while I sip my morning drug of choice, caffeine. Living Zombies are far more interesting in real life than movies.

Then they all say goody-bye and the Living Zombies go back to whatever it is they do the rest of the day until the next morning and it begins all over again.

I have concerns about all this and that is why I have chosen to blog, in this series about drugs and dealers -- legal and illegal. I think people just aren't aware of how intoxicated our country, our cities, society has become. And how the Pharmaceutical Industry profits from that.

As I said in Part One of this series, prescription Meds, legal ones can be and mostly are, a blessing.
When they are over-used, abused, they become a burden. Or a killer.
Heath Ledger, for example, took it too far. So did Janis Joplin, John Belushi, Marilyn Monroe, Elvis Presley, Michael Jackson, Annie Nicole. Need I go beyond the famous and speak of normal people like you and me?

Today's diary entry is brief because my work calls. But first, one quick analogy.

I was up most of the night last night, trying to process the fact that my friend, who has a chronic pain condition has gone completely psychotic due to mismanagement of prescription Meds.Her family and I, over the course of a couple years, have tried to weave a net to save her and it appears not to be working.

When she spoke to me last night of her house being bugged by aliens, and the blue birds being sent to her trees by neighbor spys...
when she told me I was talking in code...
when she told the one person in her life who would have taken a bullet for her - her husband-- she wanted a divorce, he said fine and walked. The husband is not only a saint, he's a great man, a man's man. The kind of husband a woman would never want to lose.

He called me. He was sane. She called me. She was not.

I tried again and again to tell her she is delusional, her mind is altered by the drugs.
I told her she needs to go back into hospital she just got out of. Or she needs to go to detox. At the very least she needs her husband back.

Instead, she told me to quit my work,and she would "buy me" (she's rich) to take care of her.
That was the point that I realized there was no point. Some people either make it or don't.

So I told her last night I know she is back on drugs. I know she is ordering them on the net. I told her she is delusional, psychotic, she is in grave danger and no, she can not "buy me." I told her she needs help I am unqualified to provide.

I believe we, her family and friends, have all done everything we can.
I told her she has two paths here. S
he can either suck it up, get through withdrawal and live life -- pain, anxiety and all like the rest of us poor schmucks out here.
Or she will end up alone, in a mental hospital, jail, or dead.
She said, "F.U." and hung up on me.

This is the fabric this series on Drug Dealers will be woven of.
As an investigator who works both criminal and civil cases, I have a great deal of experience, and expertise, in this area.
There are the drug dealers on the streets and there are the drug dealers in Doctor's offices. And then, there are the Pharmaceutical companies. It is a subject as vast and as heated ad the Sahara.

Time to grab my water bottle and hit the road.
Part three tomorrow.