InvestigateWest

Editor's Note: Sean Riley will be on KCTS 9 Connects with Enrique Cerna tonight to talk about prescription drug abuse. Watch the Preview.

by Carol Smith
InvestigateWest

Sean Riley, a 20-year homicide cop, was working an elder abuse case in 1999 in Kirkland, when he discovered one of the “perks” of his investigation.

“I’d been having a tough year,” he said. He’d gone through a divorce and had started drinking heavily. Then a gym injury led to a prescription for Vicodin. He started bumming prescriptions off doctors at the institutions where he was doing his investigations.

One pill led to another, and before long he was popping 20 to 30 a day. “I learned to chew pills to get the drug into my system faster,” he said.

By 2005, Riley was also taking increasing amounts of Percoset, morphine and Oxycontin. Eventually, a drug test busted him, and his own police chief turned him in to authorities.

Riley still figured he could beat the charges. “I know how to build cases,” he said. He shrugs now at his own arrogance. “As a police officer, you have to have an ego, be confident,” he said. “It’s how you stay safe.”

It also makes them their own worst enemies when it comes to admitting a take-down by addiction.

But shame worked.

“My dad – a guy who’d worked for 40 years, who had never had the opportunities I’d had, he looked at me and asked, ‘At what point in life do you take responsibility for your actions?’ ”Riley said. “That was it. I was done.”

He went to treatment, pleaded guilty and received three years probation.

But with a felony conviction on his record, his career as a police officer was done.  He turned instead to helping people like himself.

Rose Dennis, Board of Directors, SAMA. Credit: Ethan Morris/KCTS.

Prescription drug overdoses kill two people a day in Washington state. But the damage caused by addiction to painkillers is even more widespread. As part of its collaboration with InvestigateWest, KCTS invited recovering addicts and their families to share their stories. Here Ethan Morris, executive producer for public affairs at KCTS, interviews Rose Dennis. Dennis is on the Board of Directors of SAMA, the Science and Management of Addictions. She’s also the parent of an addicted child.

Ethan Morris: If you could start by telling us your name and maybe introduce yourself by saying your name and why you’re here.

Rose Dennis: Hello my name is Rose, and I am here today because I have a son who has an opiate pain addiction, which is the disease of addiction and he has been living with this disease for over 12 years. Unfortunately, he was introduced to opiates when he was13 and he was in the hospital fighting for his life. He had acute myelogenous leukemia, which is cancer of the blood and bone marrow. He was in the hospital for nine months, and he was also hooked up to an opiate drip. And he left the hospital cured of cancer, but with the new disease called addiction.

EM: And he needed this opiate drip for his treatment for leukemia?

RD: Well I guess so. The doctors felt at that time, because of the type of protocol therapy that he was going through, that he did need to have pain medicine. I think it’s just unfortunate that he was given such large dosages at such a young age, not knowing what the side effects were going to be.

EM: So he finishes his treatments and gets out of the hospital. What happens then?

Maria Downing, SAMA Family Action Council. Credit: Ethan Morris/KCTS.

Prescription drug overdoses kill two people a day in Washington state. But the damage caused by addiction to painkillers is even more widespread. As part of its collaboration with InvestigateWest, KCTS invited recovering addicts and their families to share their stories. Here Ethan Morris, executive producer for public affairs at KCTS, interviews Maria Downing. Downing is on the Family Action Council for SAMA, the Science and Management of Addictions, an organization that works to educate families and youth about addiction. Her grown son died of his addiction.

Ethan Morris: If you could start, tell me your name and tell me about your son?

Maria Downing: I’m Maria Downing. My son is Greg Downing, born in 1967. We didn’t know until later on that he’d actually been introduced to marijuana at 11 years of age. There was a van a couple of blocks away from the elementary school he attended, offering it to the kids. Just offering it. By 14, he was definitely drug addicted, substance addicted.

It was a struggle for everyone, including himself. I think that his perception was that he had control of it, that he could walk away from it whenever he could. I think that still was in his head somewhere, although less so by the time he passed at 41 and a half.

School became very difficult. He was a challenged student. Very, very smart. Great memory for numbers. Incredible memory. He was a poet and a writer in school, a super athlete, the best in the state really when he went up to Fort Casey for the summer school soccer programs. Also an outstanding catcher. Loved basketball, all the sports.

By Carol Smith
InvestigateWest

Rosemary Orr with her son, Robin, at his high school graduation in June, 2000.
Photo courtesy of the Rice family.

Dr. Rosemary Orr didn’t see it coming that day. It was the morning after Mother’s Day. She needed a ride to work, so her 24-year-old son Robin drove her. She was in a hurry to get to Children’s Hospital and Medical Center in Seattle, where she is a pediatric anesthesiologist. Otherwise, she says, she would have spent more time talking with him.

She’d been worried about his sleeping habits, his weight loss lately. She knew her smart, handsome son had struggled with addiction to OxyContin in the past. But he’d kicked it. He’d assured her of that. He’d looked her in the eye and said, ‘You don’t have to worry about me, Mom.”

No parent wants to believe her child is using. Not even one who is a doctor.

“I was stupid and desperate enough to believe that explanation,” Orr says now, five years later, over coffee a few miles from her work, where she takes care of the pain of others. Her own pain, she takes with her.

When she got home from work that day, Robin’s phone was ringing, but he wasn’t answering in his room downstairs. She knocked. And knocked again. She went around her house and peered in through his bedroom window.

By Carol Smith
InvestigateWest

In Spokane, Dr. Darin Nevin (left) and Lee Taylor want to expand data sharing to emergency rooms across the state.
Credit: Dan Pelle/The Spokesman-Review

Washington State has made an aggressive attempt to crack down on the prescription drug epidemic by passing strict new rules governing pain management. But even those may not be enough to stanch the flood of deaths from prescription opiates in this state.

The passage of a new law, regarded as one of the toughest in the nation, makes Washington the first state to require dosing limits for doctors and others who prescribe these medicines. The law, RCW 2876, went into effect January 2, but those who have watched the epidemic spiral out of control still see significant challenges ahead.

Among the first is the dearth of pain specialists in the state. Under the new law, doctors and other prescribers with patients who need more than 120 mg a day must seek a second opinion from a pain specialist. But there are few of those professionals to go around.

Medicaid is already struggling to comply with the new law. Despite having thousands of patients currently over the threshold limit, the agency can only get one or two evaluated by a pain specialist a month, said Dr. Jeff Thompson, medical director of the state’s Medicaid program.

“Access is an issue,” said Dr. Gary Franklin, medical director of the state’s Department of Labor & Industries, adding that telemedicine consultation programs and other efforts to increase capacity are helping, but still don’t fill the need.  

The new law makes Dr. Merle Janes of Valley Rehab & Emergency in Spokane angry. He said legitimate pain patients and doctors who prescribe for them are paying the price for the policy changes designed to nab addicts. People in real pain can’t get adequate relief, he says.

“It’s been a disaster for all these people,” Janes said.

Dr. David Tauben, a clinical associate professor and director of medical education in pain management at the University of Washington, agreed that not enough doctors are treating pain well.

“But this problem was happening well before the new law,” Tauben said. He’s optimistic that the new law will actually encourage more doctors to take on pain patients because they will have guidelines to follow to help keep them from running afoul of disciplinary agencies. The guidelines should remove ambiguity and help doctors communicate better with patients about the goals and limitations of pain treatment, he said.

By Stephanie Schendel and Robert McClure
InvestigateWest

Leftover medications are fueling an epidemic of prescription-drug abuse that is killing more Washingtonians than traffic accidents, say drug-addiction experts. Yet pharmaceutical companies have consistently torpedoed efforts here to fund a statewide disposal program for unused drugs.

Meanwhile, environmental authorities say prescription drugs are turning up in waterways and even drinking water – and it’s happening often enough that the old medications now are considered hazardous waste.

“People don’t have a safe way to dispose of these medicines,” said Margaret Shield, policy liaison for the Local Hazardous Waste Management Program in King County, a consortium of local governments. “Often people don’t think of medicines as being potentially hazardous, but they are in the wrong hands and they need to be properly disposed of just like other household hazardous waste.”

Yet efforts in Olympia to pass a law to force drug companies to pay for a statewide system for properly disposing of old medicines have foundered for five years running now in the face of opposition by the pharmaceutical industry. If the legislation passes, Washington would become the first state to require the industry to fund a drug take-back program.

About one-third of all medicines sold annually in Washington – 33 million containers of pills – go unused, say proponents of stricter regulation. Some get flushed down the toilet, but many more sit unused in medicine cabinets. This stock of drugs is a contributing factor in Washington’s epidemic of prescription drug abuse.

“More people are dying from prescription drugs than out there on the highways,” said Patric L. Slack,commander of the Snohomish Regional Drug Task Force.