'I'm a Doctor, I Hid My Opioid Addiction for 10 Years'

In 1995, two years before graduating from medical school, I took opioids for the first time.

My friend's father was a family doctor, and we got some samples from him. The fact that there used to be opioids in sample closets, as opposed to penicillin, shows that we lived in a different world back then. It's no wonder that so many people became addicted over the years.

When I took the opioids that day, something changed inside of me. I became unbelievably euphoric. I spent the next ten years just trying to recreate that experience.

I graduated from medical school in 1997. Being a general doctor was demanding. People's needs were very complicated, and back then, I only had 15 minutes to deal with each patient, learn everything about them, diagnose them, and give them a prescription.

I began prescribing opioids to patients the minute I became a doctor. Like many doctors back then, I didn't fully appreciate their dangers. I thought of opioids as helpful tools, I didn't give that much particular thought to them, or to the fact that I may have been addicted to them.

Six months into becoming a doctor, I came across one patient who scammed me for an opioid prescription. The hard part about being a doctor is that you want to give people the benefit of the doubt if they need opioids. But at the same time, people do take advantage of you.

With this patient, all my alarm bells went off because I felt that he was faking his injury. So, I followed him out into the parking lot, and when he was a block away from my office, he suddenly stopped limping.

When he saw me earlier on, he was limping in such agony, it was awful. But the fact that he so quickly straightened up and started walking normally was more educational to me than the four years that I was in medical school.

I didn't confront him, but I didn't prescribe opioids to him anymore because I knew that he was faking his injury. I was starting to understand how truly addictive opioids were. A lot of my patients wanted them because they genuinely had severe chronic pain.

But a lot of people were addicted to them. Back in the early 2000s, getting opioids from your doctor wasn't difficult, doctors were very free back then. Now, there's a lot of pressure on us not to prescribe opioids.

My opioid addiction happened over a ten-year period. Once I graduated medical school and became an intern and a resident, I had my own prescription pad. As a physician, having an addiction is very complicated, because you have the public trust, but you can dispense and access these medications so freely.

My addiction escalated, mainly because there was, and still is, no emphasis on physician health. The insurance companies and the hospitals were squeezing every drop of blood from us.

When I was a medical student, I was working an average of roughly 80 hours a week. The training was profoundly inhumane for physicians, and it's not getting any better. I then went into a very busy practice where I was still working about 80 hours a week.

I was overworked and I had no time to rest or recharge. I also didn't have time to process the very intense things that I was participating in as a doctor. Telling people that they were terminally ill, or that they have lost family members, was emotionally demanding.

After work, late at night, I would crush two to three pills and snort them. But as the years went on, this number increased to 10. I was taking hundreds of milligrams of opioids a day.

One of the biggest problems with addiction is that people are very good at hiding it from themselves. My family members noticed that I was out of it. I wasn't as sharp and focused.

I was constantly constipated and sluggish. At work, when last night's opioids would wear off, I would feel sweaty, shaky, irritable, restless, and anxious. I'd have stomach cramps, diarrhea, depression, and anxiety, and I'd feel extremely nauseous.

The withdrawal symptoms were awful. Of course, nobody knew that I was addicted, so I couldn't get medication for these side effects, and even if people did know, they don't treat doctors as they would patients.

Everybody knew that I was tuning out. My marriage was going downhill, I was working crazy hours, and I had little kids. The combination of having an unhappy home life and an unhappy work life got to me.

Nobody knew that I was so lonely and miserable—that I would sneak back to my office at night to crush up and snort oxycodone. From the outside, they saw that the lights were on in my house, but nobody was home.

Nobody understood that it was the opioids, but it could have been anything else. It could have been alcohol because when people are miserable, they reach for the tools they have at hand, even if they're not the healthiest tools.

I never wanted to use drugs at work because I never wanted to hurt a patient. But soon enough, my thoughts changed. I began thinking: "Where am I going to get my next pill? Is that the only thing that's going to stop me from feeling like I want to die?"

Thankfully, my addiction didn't directly affect my patient care because I'd never use them before work, but it indirectly affected my patient care because I would be feeling irritable, nauseous, and restless.

At work, I was starting to realize that opioids were very rewarding. I wondered, are other people pretending? I remember I used to call my doctor and tell him that I needed some Vicodin because I had a "headache" and due to him being busy and beaten down, and because of professional courtesy, he'd give them to me.

I also found other means of getting the drugs. At home, my ex-wife and I had a nanny. She had appendicitis, which I diagnosed. She was sent to the hospital, but when she came back to our home, the surgeon never gave her any pain medication, which I felt was incompetent.

So, I prescribed her some Percocet, and it helped her because she needed it. It was the right thing to do, and nobody would have bothered me for doing the right thing.

But in my addicted mind, I began thinking: "How can I keep prescribing it for her and picking it up for myself?"

This went on for months, and eventually, the pharmacist realized that I wasn't a 19-year-old nanny from New Zealand, and that's when everything changed for me.

A few months later, in 2005, I had a visit from the state police in Boston and the Drug Enforcement Administration. It was a very stressful day. They raided my office and filed criminal charges against me because they found that I was illegally prescribing myself opioids.

I was booked with three felonies and I was put on probation for two years, which meant that if I screwed anything up, like having a positive drug test, I'd go back to court and possibly go to prison.

I couldn't even leave my home state without permission. I had to visit the probation officer every couple of weeks in the basement of the courthouse. I also lost my medical license for three and a half years, and I had to do one to three drug tests one to three times a week for five years to get my medical license back.

On the surface, initially, I thought: "Why are these idiots bothering me? I don't have a problem. Other people drink alcohol at night. I don't drink alcohol, so I snort a few oxycodone."

At the time, it didn't make sense to me because heroin could get you in prison, but oxycodone, which is only one small chemical group away from heroin, we're allowed to prescribe.

But at the same time, on a deeper level, I felt anxious, stressed, and scared. I thought: "Is my career over? Is my marriage over?" I also felt relieved because I was no longer carrying a secret. They say that addiction is a disease of isolation. I felt some relief about going to get some help.

Following my addiction, my marriage was over, but fortunately, my career wasn't.

Early recovery is the most dangerous time for people recovering from addiction. Both neurochemically, because your brain pathways just want to be reignited again, and emotionally because you've lost so much.

I had a very wise advisor say to me: "If you just stop doing drugs, everything will work out." It was true, but it was very hard to see that at the moment. It was a very dark time.

I had to dig deep and figure out what was causing me to be so unhappy in the first place that I needed drugs to get by every day. My process of recovery was humbling, and it involved such deep soul-searching.

When I went back into the medical field three and a half years later, I became a much nicer doctor. I'm more genuine, I really care about my patients, particularly those who are suffering from depression, anxiety, or addiction. I feel empathic toward them.

My patients can also relate to me because I wrote a memoir about my struggle with addiction. They know that I'm the last person who's judging them because I once lost everything too, and I've walked in their shoes.

My journey has made me an infinitely better doctor. It's also made me more acutely aware that doctors are mistreated and exploited. If we don't unionize or have some form of collective bargaining, the insurance companies and the hospitals are just going to continue to suck every drop of life out of us.

I'm a big believer in legalizing drugs. I think illegal drugs are dangerous drugs. If we had legal opioids in the U.S., we wouldn't be losing 100,000 people a year to fentanyl overdoses.

I think that a small percentage of people with very severe pain need opioids. But personally, I believe that cannabis is a much more effective and safer use for many of these chronic pain symptoms syndromes, than opioids.

I am starting to believe that in many patients, cannabis is safer than non-steroidal medications too, as they can give you ulcer gastritis, destroy your kidneys, or give you a heart attack.

I'm 15 years back into being a productive physician because my friends, family, and colleagues didn't give up on me. I would say, if you have a friend, colleague, or family member whose suffering from addiction, don't give up on them.

Just keep supporting them; in due time, they will hopefully come back.

Peter Grinspoon is a primary care doctor at Massachusetts General Hospital. He is also an instructor in medicine at Harvard Medical School, a certified health and wellness coach, and a cannabis specialist. You can find out more about him here.

All views expressed in this article are the author's own.

As told to Newsweek associate editor, Carine Harb.

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