Even on the streets of sleepy Eagle River, you could see the opioid crisis coming

I remember when OxyContin first hit the streets of Eagle River when I was 18. The terms I knew, in reference to drugs, were words like “dimebag” and “blotter,” and seemingly overnight, our collective vernacular had expanded to include words like “80s,” and “OCs.” I hung out with kids who did hard drugs, but I didn’t touch them myself. At that point in my life, I had never seen or known a real junkie, but something told me to be wary. It seemed to me that the people who fell for Oxys the hardest were the ones with depth and tenderness. I liked those people. But, deep down, I knew some of them weren’t going to make it.

Things changed in my hometown after Oxys arrived. Heritage Court, the inexpensive apartment complex in Eagle River, which had always housed the potheads I bummed around with, went from being stoner central to being something else. My first real indicator that sleepy Eagle River wasn’t all peace and love anymore came when two of the kids that lived upstairs from my best friend got into an altercation with someone on the concrete pad that served as a front porch for the floor-level apartments. I hadn’t been there when the stabbing occurred and didn’t know anything about it until I was headed for my friend’s front door and noticed a large, brown stain on the cement. In my world, up until that point, knives were used for cutting fishing line and making marshmallow sticks.

Over the next five or 10 years, prescription opioids sucker punched almost every family or crowd of friends I knew. I lived in a subdivision adjacent to Ravenwood elementary school that was solidly middle to upper middle class. Kids whose parents had money started leaving state for long stretches of time without explanation (rehab). Lots of others got in trouble with the law. Here and there someone at a party would pass out wasted and never wake up. One girl I knew, who had never touched drugs, was prescribed opioids after a dental procedure. In short order, she went from a sweet, smart, successful person who was rising fast in the military, to spending ten years on and off the streets, suffering one trauma after another. There were times she prayed for death. One of the kids that rode the bus with me robbed a liquor store. I drove a friend to the emergency room after a drug-induced seizure. I learned what an abscess looks like. I discovered that addiction made it possible for one body to house two completely different people.

At the time, everyone I knew who was snorting or shooting pills didn’t really understand what they were risking. I remember people saying things like, “these are basically synthetic heroin.” Which is true. But they came from someone’s doctor, not from the streets. That fact was assurance enough the pills couldn’t be that dangerous. Turns out, doctors thought that too. What was happening in my little town was the opposite of an isolated incident.

The state, and nation, were already deep in an opioid crisis that we’re only now starting to wake up to.

I was 16 the first time I ever saw someone snorting cocaine. I was terrified. I couldn’t get a ride away from that house fast enough. But Oxys? Just little pills with the letters “OC” on one side, almost as frequently available at parties as weed. They came from some medicine cabinet somewhere, distributed by some doctor, packaged in one of those little, plastic orange canisters that meant “medicine.” They weren’t a powder you were just supposed to ingest on faith, assuming it wasn’t bathroom cleaner. Oxys weren’t tied up in a baggie and traded to some dude for cash through the window of a hoopty in a parking lot at night. Turns out they were worse. I should have been just as terrified of those pills as I was of that cocaine, but I was just a kid. I didn’t know. If there’s one lesson we should have learned by now, it’s that, as a society, we must make sure that kids now aren’t as ignorant as I was; that just because a drug comes in a little orange canister does not mean it doesn’t have the capability to ruin or end your life.