Pill Head: The Secret Life of a Painkiller Addict (21 page)

And suddenly it felt good. It made me feel alive. Maybe my emotional pain that the pills erased was no different from this reaction to surgery; it was just my brain telling me that everything was wrong. And I needed to listen to it, to fix it, instead of hiding from it. If my body was capable of producing those nociceptors in my fingertips that told me when I was touching something hot, then why wouldn’t my depression, my anxiety, my fear of the world be just another symptom that my brain was touching its own hot stove some
where up in there? I now knew I needed to get my fingers off the burner.

After an hour or two I was finally able to shift myself closer to the nightstand and turn on the light. I tried to sit up a little, but that was too much. I reached for the Vicodon bottle and the glass of water I’d heard Ollie lapping from a little earlier. I studied it, looked at my name spelled out near the name of the substance I’d spent countless hours chasing.
After this bottle
, I thought,
no more
.

JARED, CALEB, HEATHER, ME
—All of our collective experiences had hit us physically, spiritually, economically, and emotionally. But so far we had all been lucky—none of us had overdosed and not come back. According the Drug Abuse Warning Network, which collects emergency room visit data for SAMHSA, the number of opiate-related visits leapt 24 percent in just one year, from 2004 to 2005. And according to the DEA, opioid painkillers are now a factor in more drug overdose deaths than cocaine and heroin combined.

One of those deaths took on almost Shakespearean qualities. The case involved a handsome forty-nine-year-old man named James Dean, and his son, James Dean Jr. Yes, those are their real names.

I first met James Dean face-to-face in a cinder-block room at the Warren Correctional Institution in Lebanon, Ohio. We’d been exchanging letters back and forth for several months about his case. Of course I had a very particular image in my mind about what he would look like, but nothing prepared me for either his height or his row of razor sharp teeth. They’re so pronounced that I had to ask him if he’d had them filed.

“Nope, they’re all mine,” he said, but he wasn’t smiling.

James grew up with two brothers in a white, middle-class family.
From the get-go his life was pretty tragic. His father was shot and killed when James was five. James is unsure of the exact details, but he was always told that his father was the innocent victim of a stray bullet during a shoot-out.

He smoked pot with his cousin for the first time when he was thirteen. “I was, like, ‘Sure, I’ll try it,’” he says. “I guess that was pretty much my attitude toward life, even when I was young. It might have something to do with my name, I don’t know.”

He graduated high school with a certificate in electronics and joined the navy immediately after, along with his brother. Right after boot camp, his brother got leukemia; he died eighteen months later. James himself was honorably discharged in 1981, and went to college at the University of Cincinnati for electrical engineering. But he started using cocaine and drinking heavily, and eventually dropped out of college. He had a series of rocky relationships, one of which produced a son, James Dean Jr., with a woman named Laurie Bender. They called James Jr. Jimmy. A few years later he had another son, Jason Dean, with another woman. His continued partying destroyed his relationships with both of the kids’ mothers.

By 1992, James was sick of the misery his drug and alcohol addiction had caused him. He wanted to get clean. He decided that the best way to do that was to go to prison to detox, so he walked into a gas station in broad daylight, punched the clerk in the face, and stole all the money out of the cash register.

I have only his word on this story as far as it goes; it seems a flawed sort of logic, to say the least. He testified that he had actually robbed the clerk to get more money for cocaine, but whatever the reason, his plan worked. He was sentenced to six to fifteen years for robbery, got off cocaine, found God, and earned an associate’s and a bachelor’s degree from Ohio University. Four years and eight months later, he was released and paroled to his mother’s house.

He tried to rebuild relationships with Jimmy and Jason, with little success. He initially stayed clean and sober and became actively involved in the local church, but after failing to create a relationship with his sons, he fell back into drugs and alcohol.

James started his own flooring subcontracting business with a
friend and worked his ass off for the next year. In 1997 he fell in love with his mother’s best friend’s daughter, a woman named Lynda, and they were married. It was another messy relationship, and they divorced in 1999 because James had returned to his old partying ways. But they got back together again in 2000 and moved down to Fort Myers, Florida. Right before this, James hurt his back badly on a job and had to take six months off. He was diagnosed with degenerative disc disease, with bulging discs. He started physical therapy, chiropractic therapy, and massage, then got workman’s compensation. And he got his first prescription for oxycodone.

“At first I didn’t like them; I’d just give them to friends,” he says. But after moving to Florida, Lynda got pregnant, and they were having a hard time paying the bills, and James quickly realized he could sell his prescriptions to make money.

James eventually found a doctor who prescribed him one hundred and twenty 80-milligram OxyContins, one hundred and twenty 10-milligram Lorcet, ninety 4-milligram Dilaudids, and one hundred 2-milligram Xanaxes—every month.

“Then I started liking the pills,” he says. “They were drugs I didn’t go out of control on. I wasn’t staying up for days wired, like I would be on cocaine, and I could work like a beast on them because they took the pain away.”

He was eating his pills morning, noon, and night, and when the doctor’s prescriptions ran out, he found another doctor who would give him what he wanted.

“When I first started going to him, he had an office,” James remembers. “A few months later I was meeting him in a Denny’s parking lot, where he’d sell me prescriptions of whatever I wanted for $100 each.”

When their baby, Jacob, was born, they discovered he had CHARGE syndrome, a genetic condition that comes with a litany of life-threatening problems, like heart defects and breathing problems. Even though James was at this point a serious pill addict, he knew he had to make money and get insurance to help with the surgeries Jacob required to live. He got a job at Lowe’s, and because of his newfound, pill-induced work strength, he became a department
manager within six months. But lifting all day aggravated his back, and he was legally prescribed oxycodone again, along with Percocet and Demerol. He’d take what he needed for his pain and sell the rest to help pay for his baby’s mounting medical bills.

Prior to and during this entire time, James’s relationship with his two other sons, Jimmy and Jason, was strained. Neither of the children’s mothers wanted them hanging out with their father because of his past. But James claims that he kept continuing to reach out to both of them.

After fifteen months at Lowe’s, James went through upper-management training and was promoted to a different store location, in Highland Heights, Kentucky, in 2003. Highland Heights is right on the border of Cincinnati, so James moved back up north, along with all his prescriptions, to start work. He was staying temporarily at a condo owned by his mother while searching for a new home for his family. Lynda and Jacob had remained behind in Florida until James could get everything settled.

Here’s where things went to hell, and fast. According to James, a few months before he moved back to Ohio, Jimmy had come to visit him at a relative’s house in Tennessee. Jimmy saw James slipping some pills to the relative. According to James, Jimmy said, “I could sell those things in Cincinnati for fifty dollars apiece.”

James had been selling his pills for significantly less, not quite realizing how huge the market really was.

James claims that once he moved back up to Ohio, Jimmy, now nineteen years old, came to him and asked to borrow $1,000 for a paternity test on his newborn son, because he was having doubts that he was the actual father. James told him that he wouldn’t have that kind of cash until he sold his house in Florida, so Jimmy asked if he could sell some of his father’s pills to make the money. James agreed and gave him enough Xanax and OxyContin to make $1,000 on the street. But he swears that he made his son promise he wouldn’t take any pills himself.

“I wasn’t even thinking,” he says, and starts to cry. “I guess I thought it was something we could do together. When you sell drugs with someone, there’s a bond. It’s sick, but it’s real.”

It’s sick, but I get it.

A few nights later, after Jimmy had been selling his dad’s wares, he and his friend Steven showed up at the condo with some beer. They seemed slightly buzzed. James made them something to eat and then fell asleep in a recliner in front of the television.

“I woke up early in the morning,” James remembers. “I found them both on the bedroom floor. Steven was snoring, loudly. Jimmy was in a praying position, on his knees, as if he was bowing down. I said, ‘What are you doing?’ I got no response. I walked over and shook him, and he just kind of rolled over.”

Instead of calling 911 immediately, he called Lynda in Florida to talk him through CPR. Then he called 911 and continued trying to resuscitate Jimmy.

“Suddenly, all of this foam came out of my son’s mouth, and blood started pouring out of his nose,” James said quietly.

When the EMTs and the police arrived, James made no effort to hide the OxyContin. He gave them his prescription bottle and told them that he thought the two boys had overdosed on them. “But I told the police that Jimmy had stolen them,” he admits. “I lied about it. I was in a state of shock. I question myself about it to this day.”

Jimmy was pronounced dead on arrival at the hospital. Steven spent several days in the intensive care unit on a ventilator system before being released.

James was initially indicted on several counts: for involuntary manslaughter, aggravated trafficking in drugs, corrupting another with drugs, and drug possession—all felony charges.

James’s lawyer, Kenneth Zuk, was able to work out a deal with the state of Ohio in which all other charges would be dismissed if James pleaded guilty to two counts of corrupting another with drugs. These are second-degree felonies, with fines and mandatory prison terms of two to eight years. He would not be eligible for judicial release or community control. James knew that by entering this plea he might have to serve both sentences consecutively instead of concurrently. His sentencing hearing was set for April 7, 2004, at the Claremont County courthouse, by the Honorable William Walker.

Emotions were running extremely high, so much so that Judge
Walker had to begin the proceedings with a warning. “We have a lot of folks here today who have an interest in this case,” he told the courtroom. “I caution you because if there is a problem in the hallway or in the courtroom, the deputies in the building here have strict instructions to take those matters seriously and get them under control immediately. Which may mean someone might get taken into custody, and we don’t want that to happen here today.”

The state brought in several individuals to testify against James. The last two were Jimmy’s mother, Laurie Bender, and his stepfather, Will Bender.

Will Bender’s testimony was interesting. While all the previous witnesses put the blame directly on James, Bender admitted that “Jimmy wasn’t the perfect kid.”

Of course not, that’s because there’s no such thing as a perfect kid. James told me that Will Bender had once called him in the middle of the night, demanding that James find some sort of protection for Jimmy because he had robbed someone of a kilo of meth that was now sitting in their home. James claims he stayed out of it, but that Jimmy ended up selling the meth out of Laurie and Will’s home.

When Laurie Bender, Jimmy’s mother, took the stand, all she said was, “I don’t really have a whole bunch to say today. A mother shouldn’t really have to take this position. It’s a shame that so many lives have been deeply affected. It’s a good thing to have drug dealers out of society and incarcerated. Eighteen years is definitely not enough in exchange for one life, but I know that James is convicted of guilt. I know that James Dean will have guilt in his heart for the rest of his life.”

Laurie Bender tracked me down when she found out I had been speaking with James Dean. We spoke and emailed at length about many things, including James’s accusation that they had allowed meth in the house while Jimmy was alive, but usually we just talked about Jimmy’s life. Most of our conversations were off the record, though, and I won’t violate that trust. But she did insist that she never allowed drugs in the house, and that Jimmy was a depressed kid. “He always tried to please everyone,” she told me, “but he
also seemed to know that something bad was going to happen to him.”

I was also able to track down Steven, the boy Jimmy was with when he overdosed. But despite my credentials, Steven was afraid that I was personally affiliated with James and that James was trying to track him down. Steven refused to grant an interview.

James Dean’s sole defense came down to his lawyer, Kenneth Zuk: