240 mg of Oxycodone in 24 Hours

In high school I started messing around with pills when I was in 10th grade. Started out stealing tramadol from my father until he was eventually prescribed Percocet. I would steal those from him as well. By the end of 11th grade, I was totally hooked. A big issue for me was that I had been caught by my father several times and so I wasn’t able to keep stealing from him. Instead, I was stealing from everyone else to get money to buy more pills. It was difficult to find people who were selling Percocet or Vicodin, but eventually I found pretty reliable sources. By my senior year of high school I had a roughly $120 a day Vicodin habit. As a high schooler with no job, that meant that all of the money I used to buy the pills was coming from stealing. I eventually decided to just start stealing from the dealers. I told them to front me the pills and I’d get back to them, which I did at first, but then I just started asking for fronts with higher volumes and then would just burn bridges.

After high school I got a job, but it was increasingly more difficult to find people selling Percocet or Vicodin. I had a half brother who was a heroin addict for most of my life. He was also 10+ years older than me. I saw the way that his addiction to heroin fucked up everyone else’s life besides his own. It caused a major rift between my father and I, starting when I was about 11 or 12. My dad would come home from work always on edge and yell at my mother and I for stupid shit. It led to a few physical altercations as I got older as well. I always kept my half brother in my head as a reminder of what I didn’t want to be become.

So, here I am, an 18 year old with a job and no source for pills, but tons of sources for heroin. I ended up making what I consider the smartest-stupid decision of my life. I had a friend, who had a friend, who sold suboxone. My friend and I had done suboxone a couple of times together and we loved it. It was like getting a pretty intense high for more than double the length of time of Percocet or Vicodin. I decided instead of spending $7 on heroin and ruining my life, and everyone’s around me, that I would spend $20 per suboxone pill and start abusing that instead.

I was now spending $20-$60 each time I wanted to get high, saving $60-$90 each time, while also making it very difficult to abuse other opiates including, God forbid, heroin. That started in 2013. I abused suboxone for roughly 2.5 years before just using it as intended. Occasionally I would take a little more if I had a bad day. I hurt a ton of people with my addictions, but in my mind, I always thought, “at least I haven’t ever done heroin”. If I had started doing heroin I would have died for sure.

In late 2015, my uncle suddenly died. It wasn’t drug related at all, but he was kind of the glue that held my family together. Everyone was so heart broken, and there I was being strong for everyone. It wasn’t even that I was being strong on purpose, I just couldn’t feel like everyone else could. My family started getting together more often and I would lay in the other room. I’d go outside and binge smoke, or smoke some weed and then just not see anyone. Eventually I realized how fucked up I was being. In March of 2016, the same night I saw Coheed for the first time ever, I decided to quit smoking weed. A month later I quit smoking cigarettes. These two things caused a noticeable difference in myself and how I interacted with my family.

In 2017 I decided to come clean to my family about my suboxone use and I cold turkeyed it. This caused me to miss both of the NY Good Apollo Neverenders. It’s one of my favorite albums of all time but I almost feel like it was the price I had to pay to be able to feel and function as a normal human being again. This May was my 6 year sober mark, and I’ve been close with my family ever since. In 2019 my half brother would lose his battle with heroin and die. I know that that could have been me. There were tons of times it should have been me. I had gotten away with taking 140mg of Vicodin and then getting completely hammered in the same night so many times. I had driven while high on every drug I had ever done, including mushrooms. I used to drive drunk. All these things I didn’t care about at the time because nothing bad ever happened while I was doing them.

I look back on it now and it makes me so fucking angry how I not only risked my own life so many times, but the lives of other innocent people. In my senior year of high school, I was borderline suicidal. What I mean by that is, I wasn’t actively trying to kill myself, but I was doing things that would definitely kill people and not caring whether or not they would kill me. This would reach its peak when I decided to take 48 of my fathers Percocet in a span of only a few hours. Each one was 5mg of oxycodone and 325mg of Tylenol. This was 240mg of oxycodone and 15,600mg of Tylenol (roughly 4x the lethal dose in a 24hr time span). Nothing happened to me. I didn’t get high and I didn’t get sick. I just existed for that day. In a sense, I almost feel like I have survivors’ guilt from that day. I’ve had many friends and acquaintances die from drugs or other things in the past 10 years. They were all such good people. Sometimes I wonder why and how I survived my binge of 48 Percocet, but my friends were dying from much less.

Anyway, I’ve rambled for too long. I’ve been sober 7 years and I couldn’t imagine my life any other way. I can feel now, and speak, and love, and hurt. I’m no longer just numb and bitter. Hell, by the time you read this, I may have even proposed to my girlfriend of 4 years. I’m grateful for people like you who have shared your story, and I think the more that others share theirs, the more it can help people struggling with addiction right now.