JUNE 2018|The Australian Women’s Weekly 109
Investigation
For Jessica Khachan and Rustie Lassam, one
perfectly legal prescription painkiller began a spiral
to addiction.Ingrid Pyneinvestigates the opioid
epidemic and meets two of its brave survivors.THEOPIOID
One pill
The majority of them are “everyday
people” like Jessica who have become
unwittingly addicted to the drugs,
according to Dr Hester Wilson, a
general practitioner and drug
addiction specialist.
“The people I see are mostly middle-
aged men and women. They have
started on opioids, not to get high,
but to cure their pain – be it
endometriosis, a motor vehicle
accident or back pain,” she says. “But
once they start on them, they ind
they cannot stop. When they try, they
experience withdrawal symptoms such
as nausea, vomiting, insomnia, the
shakes, goosebumps. Plus there is this
overwhelming craving to use the
medication again.”
Rustie Lassam knows that feeling all
too well. At 16, in the grip of puberty,
she went to a doctor for back pain,
and was prescribed Panadeine Forte
and Valium. To her, the drugs felt
like heaven. She started having a few
more pills each day. And so began a
downward spiral into prescription
drug abuse that would last more
than three decades and utterly derail
Rustie’s life. By 32 she’d been married
and divorced twice. At the peak of her
addiction she was was taking nine
80mg tablets of opioid Oxycontin and
ive 5mg tablets of Valium a day, while
also getting Pethidine injections from
her doctor. “And this is from someone
who grew up in a nice, middle-class →A
round Christmas, the time
of miracles, Sydney mum
Jessica Khachan was told it
was a wonder she was still
alive. Her weight had
plummeted from 55kg to 30kg, her
blood count was dangerously low,
her face was an unnatural grey-green,
and doctors at Westmead Hospital in
western Sydney had just discovered an
ulcer on the brink of bursting. “The
specialist said to me, ‘That’s the
biggest stomach ulcer I have ever
seen’,” recalls Jessica, 44. “It’s a
miracle you are still here.’”
How Jessica got to this point is a
story as mundane as it is horrifying.
Two years earlier, in 2010, she
had been prescribed the opioid
hydrocodone to relieve pain from
routine wisdom-tooth surgery. When
her script ran out, she went to the
chemist and bought a pack of Nurofen
Plus – then another. Like a growing
number of Australians, she quickly
became addicted.
Two pills a day became six, then
eight. Within two years, Jessica was
taking 90 Nurofen Plus per day – not
in one gulp, but throughout the day,
just to keep going. “They made me
feel normal,” Jessica tells The Weekly.
“They made me feel able to get up and
do things. I didn’t feel high on them,
but if I couldn’t have them, I’d lie in
bed. The minute I swallowed a few
pills, I’d be able to get on with the day.”By Christmas 2012, with her health
in crisis for no apparent reason,
Jessica’s perplexed family insisted on
taking her to hospital. Jessica was
scared, ashamed and deep in denial.
“I didn’t know I had a problem,” she
says. “I knew about people in recovery
from alcohol addiction or other drug
problems, but I’d never heard of
anyone who had a painkiller addiction.”
Experts warn that Australia’s
addiction to prescription opioids is
reaching crisis point. Our use of
opioid-based painkillers has
quadrupled in the past decade, levels
of prescription opioid overdose are at
record levels, and prescription drugs
account for almost three-quarters of
all accidental drug-related deaths.
At last count, in 2013, 11.4 per cent
of Australians admitted to misusing
prescribed drugs, up from 7.4 per cent in- Surprisingly, the two groups with
the largest increase in misuse are women
in their forties and men in their thirties.
Prescription drugs
account for three-
quarters of all
accidental drug-
GETTY IMAGES. related deaths.