In Indiana, the drugs that nearly destroyed my life were perfectly legal. Doctors administered them through IV lines while I lay in hospital beds: morphine, fentanyl, Dilaudid. I wasn’t chasing a high. I was a patient, and I trusted the system.
Between 2014 and 2019, my life became a revolving door of hospital admissions. I would arrive sick and in pain, get stabilized with powerful opioids, begin to feel normal again, and eventually be discharged. For a while, things would seem fine. Then something would go wrong, and I’d end up right back where I started—another ambulance ride, another hospital bed, another IV line delivering the same medications.
At the time, I didn’t question any of it. I believed the hospital was helping me. No one ever explained how dependency could develop quietly underneath the surface. I thought I was just dealing with an illness that kept returning.
Looking back now, the pattern seems obvious. At the time, it didn’t.
When the Pattern Became Clear
The opioid cycle doesn’t always announce itself. It builds slowly until one day you realize your life revolves around it.
During those years, I watched the opioid epidemic claim people around me—friends, family members, a brother-in-law, cousins, my best friend’s son. Some overdosed. Others disappeared from the lives they once had. I didn’t think my story belonged in the same category. I wasn’t buying drugs on the street. I wasn’t trying to get high. I was a patient.
But by 2019, I was exhausted in a way that sleep couldn’t fix. That’s when I finally started to question the pattern—not just the illness, but the cycle itself. By then, the physical and emotional toll had caught up with me. There were nights when the …
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Author: Roddy Sorrell / High Times
