PILL BEGAN WOMAN'S ROAD TO ADDICTION

Donna Gobble sat fidgeting with the Lifesaver sucker she twirled nervously
in her hands while talking candidly about her opiate addiction.

It was easy to picture a day when a piece of candy must have satisfied the
only craving of the little girl this 28-year-old woman must once have been.

The Carter County native said she was not the typical "junkie," at least
not at first any way.

All of those warning signs that parents are told to watch for - a sudden
loss of interest in appearance, falling or failing grades, a gradual
withdrawal from family and friends, appearing sad or tired much of the time
- - none of these applied to Donna.

"I was happy for what I felt like was the first time in my whole life. The
drugs took all of my anxieties away, gave me complete self-confidence and
made me feel like I was someone really special," Donna said.

At age 6, she experienced a childhood trauma so severe that it began to
torment her in her sleep by the time she was 11. She had nightmares that
repeated themselves relentlessly.

"My father committed suicide by hanging himself in the shed outside my
grandmother's house. I was with my grandmother when she found him," Donna said.

Diagnosed as suffering from post-traumatic stress disorder, Donna said the
psychological suppression of her father's death may have been one of the
factors that led to her drug dependency.

"At first, the highs were extremely high - euphoric. I remember one of my
friends who was using with me at the time describing the feeling as 'better
than the best sex you've ever had,' " Donna said.

On one particular night in 1991, her newfound happiness was created by a $2
street drug, Lortab, a habit-forming pain pill.

"My boyfriend bought two. He took one and gave me the other. I was 15 or 16
at the time," she said.

"Now don't get me wrong. As a teenager, I was never what you'd call an
angel. I had experimented with drugs and alcohol, just like a lot of kids
my age. I smoked marijuana, dropped acid, snorted cocaine, but none of
those 'did it' for me like Lortab. Just one, and it was like something
clicked in my brain. I was hooked," Donna said.

"Lortab is an opioid that affects the endorphins in your brain which are
responsible for giving you pleasure. It's like taking the very best you are
capable of feeling about yourself on a really good day and making it better
by boosting it about 10,000 times."

Describing herself as "one of the popular girls" at her high school, Donna
said her grades were good, and she was attending church regularly. Lortab
gave her a sudden surge of energy she had never had before, and outwardly,
Donna seemed a perfectly "peppy" teenager.

"It started out as one Lortab every weekend. From there, it escalated to
two on Fridays and two on Saturdays, telling myself all along that I was
doing it just to be sociable. Pretty soon, it became hard to get through
the week without one - and then two," Donna said.

By the time she was 18 years old, on a slow day, Donna was "eating" 10-15
Lortabs per day at $5 per pill. Her $2 debut "high" had become more than a
$100-a-day, full-blown drug habit.

"I was a middle-class girl with an upper-class-priced addiction, and Lortab
was just getting too expensive for me to buy on the street. Since it was
taking more and more of the pills just to keep me from getting sick, I
started shooting morphine into the veins of my hands," Donna said.

Shooting morphine required still purchasing pills, but by crushing one with
the base of a soda can and adding water to it in a syringe along with an
unused cigarette filter, one 60 milligram dose of morphine could tide Donna
over for an entire day - at a bargain price of $50.

"I reached the point to where I would wake up sick every morning and felt
like I wanted to die I hurt so bad," Donna said.

"It's like having the flu, only 10 times worse. You vomit, and you're still
nauseated. Every single muscle in your body twitches and aches. You chill.
You sweat. Then, you break out in a cold sweat. Your chest hurts, and your
heart pounds. Your head hurts so bad, you can literally feel your hair
throbbing."

And that is only an abbreviated list of the physical effects of drug
withdrawal.

"The depression is so all encompassing that you can feel it in the depths
of your soul. It's a blackness that envelops you and makes you feel as if
you are smothering. You're afraid to sleep, because you're scared you won't
wake up. You dread waking up, because you know you're going to be jolted
into the cold, hard reality that you are a junkie, and that's all you're
ever going to be."

But it is the craving in the brain that is the worst for all addicts. Even
those who manage to survive the devastating withdrawal symptoms continue to
crave the drug's psychological effects.

"You feel as if you will lose your mind if you don't get that fix. Imagine
something that you want so bad you can't stand it - even if in some
people's case that craving is only a piece of chocolate cake. If you're
addicted to drugs, you can think of nothing but satisfying that craving.
You go to bed and have dreams about drugs, and you wake up every morning
hustling, panicked that you won't be able to find that pill before you get
'dope sick.' "

For Donna, it meant stealing money and anything worth money from her
family, shoplifting clothes in order to return them in exchange for quick
cash and even selling her household appliances, including her washing machine.

"I sold all my jewelry. I honestly think at one time if I could have
removed my soul from my body and exchanged it for drugs, I would have.
Sometimes I feel as if I did anyway. There's just no limit to the desperate
measures desperate people will take."

By the time her mother discovered a syringe in her pocketbook, Donna was
using $150 worth of morphine a day, about 200 milligrams for one injection
that now lasted no longer than six hours.

"I could swallow 16 Dilaudids over a six-hour period and still drive," she
said.

"I was 20 years old, and I weighed 115 pounds. I might have been bathing
once a week, if I remembered. I left home, because my mother and I were
always fighting over my drug problem. The drugs took everything. There was
now no hiding it or denying it. Everyone knew I had a problem. I would
steal money from my mother and cry while I was shooting dope, because I
felt so guilty about what I was doing to her," Donna said.

Drug treatment programs - two in-patient and one out-patient - proved
worthless in Donna's struggle against drug abuse.

"I felt powerless and morally flawed, because I couldn't quit craving the
drug. And nothing was working. Programs that cost my mother $1,000 a day
were useless. It was cheaper for me to just do drugs. My insurance wouldn't
pay for a program long enough for me to get clean.

"When the insurance company stops paying, your stay is up. My mother and I
begged for them to keep me in one of Johnson City's in-patient programs,
promising to pay without the insurance. They refused."

With nowhere left to turn, Donna said she became "sick and tired of being
sick and tired" and finally sought information on a methadone clinic in
Asheville, N.C., where she began driving 150 miles round-trip every day to
receive the long-acting, synthetic narcotic that works for opiate addicts
in a similar fashion to an anti-depressant for those suffering from depression.

When used in proper doses, methadone does not create euphoria, sedation or
analgesic effects and actually prevents street drugs from giving the addict
those sensations.

The daily drive to Asheville sounded insane to some of her friends, but
Donna insisted that it was time and money better spent than it would have
been seeking out drugs. In fact, it was more like a vacation, because she
was so exhausted from the vicious circle created by her constant search for
her next fix.

"I know that a lot of people are critical of methadone. I had a medical
doctor in Carter County throw me out of his office when I told him I was
being treated with methadone. But I can honestly tell you methadone is the
only reason I'm still alive today."

That was six years ago. Since then, Donna has taken one dose of methadone
every single day, along with a prescribed anti-depressant, and she no
longer experiences drug cravings.

She is now traveling to a methadone clinic in another state once every two
weeks and plans to continue her treatment, which costs $70 per week,
indefinitely.

Donna currently serves as the director for Tennessee's chapter of ARM,
Advocates for Recovery through Medicine.