Our Elizabeth: Her Struggle With Opioid Addiction

In the late 1990’s pharmaceutical companies reassured the medical community that patients would not become addicted to time released opioid pain relievers and healthcare providers began to prescribe them at greater rates. Increased prescription of opioid medications led to widespread misuse of both prescription and non-prescription opioids before it became clear that these medications could indeed be highly addictive. Today it is estimated that over 2 million people in the US suffer from an opioid disorder and over 130 of them die from an opioid overdose each and every day.
Our daughter, Elizabeth, had everything going for her when she graduated from high school in 2006. She not only graduated with a GPA that earned her a Georgia Hope Scholarship, but she was beautiful, talented, and kind. She was determined that she wanted to attend Auburn University and was accepted into their school of journalism. She wanted to become a journalist. That bright future all changed when she became addicted to opioids via misuse of OxyContin. Most people picture poor inner-city youth when they hear the term opioid addict not youth from middle to upper middle class suburbs. But Elizabeth was typical of those caught in the web of the opioid epidemic that gripped the country in 2009. The next few years would be a never ending struggle for Elizabeth to recover from her addiction and an even more frustrating struggle for us as her family to help her try to achieve and maintain sobriety.
This book describes her struggle and our family’s struggle with her addiction and tries to explain just how our country became enveloped in this epidemic.