Pill Head: The Secret Life of a Painkiller Addict
By Joshua Lyon
Hyperion
Addiction memoirs are not only thriving as a publishing trend in the post–James Frey era, they’ve become a genre unto themselves, complete with their own formulaic structure: Protagonist suffers childhood trauma/feels low self-esteem and emptiness/uses drugs and/or alcohol to fill the hole. Joshua Lyon’s Pill Head follows this structure to some degree, but it adds a few new wrinkles, foremost of which is an element he repeatedly explores in conversations with doctors and users: Because prescription drugs are legal, people feel safer about taking them. They have that medical seal of approval, so even when they’re being misused or redirected, people tend to underestimate the risks involved.
Lyon starts out with an assignment from Jane magazine to see how easy it is to order pills online. Turns out, very easy. Curious, he takes a few…then a few more. Soon his stash is gone and he re-ups. Before long, he is using all the time, eventually gaining access to a notorious dealer nicknamed Candyman. “As long as I had pills, I had a friend,” Lyon writes, and the power of his story lies in its avoidance of sentimentality or “life lessons.” Lyon isn’t big on meetings, he roundly criticizes DARE and Just Say No, and he talks about the highs of drug use as well as the lows. He also looks at the facts about prescription drugs and interviews a range of people caught in their web. The result is a forceful cautionary tale, made all the more effective by its lack of moralizing.
