As I’ve written previously, before this series, the paperback version of Ryan Hampton’s book includes an updated section to his story in which he demonizes pharmaceutical companies and blames them for his addiction without acknowledging his own role in creating his own problem.
He wrote that pharmaceutical companies were guilty of “medically sanctioned mass murder,” that if they “were drug dealers, they'd be behind bars for life,” and compares entire, federally regulated American companies to “El Chapo.”
Hampton also claims the pharmaceutical industry “buys elected officials in every branch of government” and invokes 9/11, the Titanic, and plane crashes full of dead passengers to depict those he blames for his addiction.
But the fact is, his own actions and choices – willfully and knowingly made – led to his addiction that didn’t lead others down the same path.
He was given a prescription by a doctor and immediately began misusing it. He was popping more pills than prescribed and lied about his injury to keep getting more rather than taper off as his doctor advised.
And the misuse of opioid prescriptions was not as widespread as he would have you believe.
According to numerous studies, the number of people who misuse and abuse opioids for short-term pain – like his ankle/knee injury – is somewhere between 1-3%.
Hardly the epidemic he claims. So let’s continue…
* * *
“I used prescription pills for a long time,” Hampton writes. Then continues:
“I kept using pills, through the stressful times and the good ones. They were my safety net, my security blanket. I worked on one political campaign after another. I landed multiple senior-level staff positions with the Democratic Party. My star was rising. … I justified my usage and need by focusing on any excuse in my life.”
So not only was he lying to all the doctors and pain clinics who wrote him prescriptions, he was lying to himself.
Lying seems to just be an innate part of his being.
Hampton clearly knew what he was doing but did it anyway. Yet somehow, we’re supposed to blame his doctors and the pharmaceutical companies for his misuse and abuse that comparatively few experienced?
In 2009, Hampton writes, he temporarily kicked the habit – but then “relapsed on pills.”
It was then that he “started cooking and injecting the pills.”
“I watched YouTube videos about how to shoot up,” he writes. “I practiced tying off my arm and watching my veins rise and throb out of my skin.”
He added that “I did this with the same collegiate attitude I had toward writing a term paper. I was gathering facts, that’s all. I didn’t think about the horrific consequences.”
He writes that he knew he should “Just Say No” but that his “need to get high” was saying “Why not?”
He picks up from there:
“I went to a pharmacy and asked for some clean syringes – the kind people use to inject insulin. They were small, slim plastic tubes with long orange caps.
“I took them home in a bag. I had a spoon, a lighter, a cotton ball, and these sterile syringes. I crushed the pills, put them in the spoon with some water and heated it up.
“Let’s see what happens, I thought.
“I followed the instructions. They worked. And just like that, my addiction completely took over my life. … (O)nce the needle went into my arm, there was no turning back.”
Again, no doctor or pain clinic or pharmaceutical company told him to crush up the pills and inject them into his arm. That’s something he did on his own after studying YouTube videos.
“The shots left marks on my arm, but I didn’t care,” Hampton continues.
One day he went to get more pills from a Dr. Sullivan who ran a pain clinic. And when the receptionist rolled up his sleeve, “she saw the track marks on my skin” and informed the doctor.
“Sullivan was furious with me,” Hampton writes. “She accused me of drug-seeking, called me a ‘junkie,’ humiliated and confused me. Hadn’t she been giving me the prescription?”
Again, no self-responsibility. It was somehow the doctor’s fault that he watched YouTube videos and learned how to shoot the pills into his arm.
The doctor banned him from the clinic “and told me that if I ever came back, they’d call the police.”
He returned home, out of pills. And this is where he really fell off the deep end:
“My neighbor, seeing the condition I was in, offered me some of the heroin he had in a piece of foil. This time I didn’t turn him down. I snorted what he gave me, then caught the bus to buy new syringes at the pharmacy.
“When I returned home, I locked myself in my room and prepared by first shot of heroin. Easy.
“The first time I missed my vein completely. But the second time I got it. I really got it. As I felt my new reality take hold, I was already planning on how I could score again. I had officially leveled up to IV heroin. Game over.”
The neighbor – not the doctor, not the pain clinic, not the pharmaceutical companies – had previously encouraged Hampton to try heroin, “telling (him) it was cheaper and more effective than the pills.”
Research suggests two separate, low-probability steps stand between an opioid prescription and heroin use.
First, patients prescribed opioids for a short-term injury – Hampton's situation – misuse them at notably lower rates than chronic-pain patients, on the order of 1-3%.
Second, even among the small number of people who do misuse prescription opioids, only an estimated 4-6% go on to use heroin.
Compounding two low-probability events makes the overall path from a short-term prescription to heroin exceedingly unlikely, though obviously not impossible.
And yet, according to Hampton, the doctors, pain clinicians, and pharmaceutical executives are the ones who are guilty of “medically sanctioned mass murder” and should “be behind bars for life”?
We’ll pick up from here in Part 5.
FAMOUS LAST WORDS
“From the minute I woke up until the instant I fell asleep, heroin was the only thing I thought about.” – Ryan Hampton, “American Fix”
Chuck Muth is president of Citizen Outreach, publisher of Nevada News & Views, and founder of CampaignDoctor.com. You can sign up for his conservative, Nevada-focused e-newsletter at MuthsTruths.com. His views are his own.