Chills Pills: A Growing Epidemic

The Malibu Beach Recovery Center, a rehab clinic for the rich and famous, clings like a determined survivor to a picturesque hillside a short drive from the Malibu movie colony. In just the past year alone, street drugs have given way to something just as deadly among the high-end clientele seeking help here.

“The biggest drug dealer around is your parents’ medicine cabinet,” the center’s owner, Joan Borsten, told NBC4.

Borsten, a veteran of the movie business, described 60 percent of her new clients as addicts hooked on prescription meds – and not just the anti-anxieties, like Xanax or Klonopin. More and more of them, she said, are zoned out on heavy-hitters like Fentanyl, often used by cancer patients.

“We had a client who came in here after eating a Fentanyl patch,” Bornsten said.

Fentanyl, a pain killer many times more powerful than morphine, is sometimes applied by skin patch. Borstein said its long term effects may not be well understood since it is designed to deliver fast, short-term relief for the terminally ill.

Joan’s client, a hard-charging actress, overdosed and nearly died.

“She had been on it for three years,” Joan said. “Her body was shutting down.”

Some of Joan’s clients use their acting skills to keep their medicine cabinets well stocked with extras. Two brothers put together a traveling tear-jerker in which one wheeled the other into an ER, posing as a disabled man in desperate need of instant high-powered pain relief.

They were so convincing that the state of Colorado later hired one of them to help spot scam artists working the urgent-care circuit.

Another client became so practiced at playing the all-suffering clinic-crawler that she knew exactly how many milligrams of a certain pill a doctor should prescribe to keep her high.
Joan quoted the actress as telling one overworked internist: “Six [milligrams] is the minimum that will help me.”

The doctor was so relieved at having his diagnostic chores eased that he promptly put her on a diladin drip. After taking several hits of the drug, the woman asked Joan to unhook her so she could grab a cigarette break.

A paramedic, who was present, remarked, “Now that’s what you call a professional patient.”

For Shannon Scott, a former addict and businesswoman who works with Joan, her own special taste was for booze laced with Xanax, an increasingly popular combo with pill addicts.

The same debilitating cocktail popped up as a featured player in news stories about Whitney Houston’s last days of hard partying. Houston was never a patient at the center. But her accidental death by drowning in a hotel bathtub, confirmed by preliminary autopsy reports, suggested a blackout like the ones Shannon used to suffer under the dual influence of Xanax and hard liquor.

“It was scary, Shannon recalled.” I started blacking out. I would lose days.”

When she learned how Houston had died, she said she was “chilled” because “that could have been me.”

The musicians and singers who seek Joan’s help often blame their lapse into the pill bottle on the massive stress of unrelenting nightly gigs in front of thousands of unforgiving fans. By her account, they also insist that their downward spiral was made all the easier because their supplier was a doctor, not some sleazy street dealer.

The white smock and prescription pad, they told her, gave them what turned out to be a false sense of security about what they were wolfing down.

In her experience, such a willing suspension of skepticism is typical of many pill junkies.

“Just because a doctor prescribed something,” she said, shaking her head ruefully, “doesn’t mean that you can take it or you can mix it with other prescriptions?

The frequent-flyer lifestyle of Joan’s show-biz clients – and anybody else – can lead to pill shopping at every stop-over.

The frequent-flyer lifestyle of Joan’s show-biz clients, and anybody else, she said, can lead to pill-shopping in every stop-over, few questions asked.

By her account, Florida is often a choice destination because local doctors and pharmacists tend to be fairly lenient in meeting the prescription needs of the state’s large retiree population.

“There are apparently drug dealers in California who will fly to Florida, get drugs there and then bring them back and sell them here,” she told NBC4. “There are people who, if they can’t get [their med fix] in their own state, will get on a charter flight to Florida and go to pill mills.

To make things worse, there’s no public database for tracking prescriptions nationwide, from state to state, Joan said. Some states do have reliable local tracking systems, but unfortunately California is no longer one of them.

It’s once robust state-focused database is cripplingly short of funds, Joan said, and sometimes shut to subscribers.

“I have clients who will take a prescription that they get in one state,” she added, “and go to Kinko’s and get a perfect replica and go to another state and fill it again.”

Many of Joan’s clients blame their doctors for their woes. They fault them for not spending enough time counseling them on the risks of pill addiction, and for not spotting symptoms in time.

But such blind spots may be built into the medical profession, according to Allen Glass, a counselor who works at the center. “Doctors get little training in chemical dependency at their medical schools,” he said. “Sometime only one brief course, nine to five, on a weekend.”

And pill addiction is often difficult to recognize, with less obvious warning signs than street drugs, according to Shannon.

“The pupils may not dilate, the blackouts may not begin, until you are way far gone,” she said.

She got hooked on Xanax after borrowing pills from a roommate simply to ease run-of-the-mill tension, and neither realized how quickly she became addicted or how the drug’s effects were magnified by her nightly glass of wine.

“I didn’t use them to get high,” she said of the pills. “I was using them to be my normal self.”

The good news for Joan’s clients is that rehab is possible for prescription meds. But, she told NBC4, it usually takes sixty days of hard detox because pills have a longer half-life than many street drugs and may be used with other chemical substances that don’t mix well.

Because of the special detox problems, when Shannon tried to go cold turkey overnight, the center’s staff warned her that could be deadly.

“You could go into seizures if you don’t do it the right way,” Shannon said.

Joan and other clinic operators have lobbied state lawmakers to get pharmaceutical companies to help pay for the state’s under-funded prescription database, so your doctor can keep track of the pills you’re getting elsewhere. But, she said, the large pharmas have resisted.

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