G.I. Aspirin Part 1

It's all fun and games until someone loses a career.

I joined the Air Force out of High School because I wasn’t ready to take college seriously yet, if ever. And my parents had zero interest in my “plan” to live at home, play in a band, and take Music Appreciation or Shoelace Retipping at the local CC until I figured shit out. Then as luck would have it, I tested well enough on the military placement exam to become an E.E.G. technician in the medical field. Not a bad gig though it did require two years of school, of course. 

Working in the hospital, it was pretty easy to get medical appointments for whatever, whenever you wanted them. I was first prescribed Percocet for migraine pain early in my career. It was given out a lot back then. At one point, I remember hearing it referred to as “G.I. Aspirin.” It took years for my addiction to develop. Like most of my friends and co-workers, we just enjoyed the occasional refill when we got it.

But I worked shoulder-to-shoulder with a lot of doctors. I eventually learned that I could prescribe myself whatever I wanted via the hospital computer system if they didn’t log out before they left their desks. That’s when the real problem started. And over the course of the next year, I developed a very serious addiction to opiates. By the time I was finally caught, I was prescribing myself so much Percocet that they were quite convinced I was selling it. When I was placed in a solitary confinement jail cell for a few days, I went through severe withdrawals before being released to await the investigation and subsequent trial.