RAZOR, September, 2005
Forget cocaine, meth, and heroin – today’s upwardly mobile reach into the medicine cabinet when they want to enhance their buzz. Meet the members of Generation Rx, a group that has never had a feeling they couldn’t enhance or shroud with a pill.
By Anna David
Austin Bryce*, a 30-year-old San Franciscan living in Paris on a graduate school grant, had been mixing vodka with extra-strength codeine all night, and the combination was magnificent. Gazing at the multi-level Parisian dance club, Bryce smiled and shook his head at the French people on the dance floor rapping along to Dre and Snoop songs without a clue what the words actually meant.
Though the guys who worked at the club looked “tough,” Bryce couldn’t stomach the idea of paying over 100 Euro for a bottle of vodka, so he decided to steal a case he spied behind a slew of cloaks in the unguarded coat closet. Jimmying himself through the door’s partition, “Dukes of Hazzard style,” he wrapped several bottles in his jacket and jumped out the same way he came in. After booking upstairs with his friends – an eclectic, all French group assembled by the guy Bryce was staying with – he cracked open the first bottle and distributed the rest to the others.
As an established graffiti artist and semi-regular shoplifter who got busted tagging in Amsterdam and narrowly escaped spending 12 years in a Dutch prison, Bryce is, by most people’s definition, a risk-taker. Still, he probably wouldn’t have casually lifted pricey bottles if he hadn’t been on the extra-strength codeine he’d procured from a prescription-happy Parisian doctor the day before. “They were these big tablets that you put in liquid and let dissolve, like Alka-Seltzer,” Bryce says now, sounding excited by the memory. “It gets into your system a lot faster than if it was just a regular pill.”
Though Bryce was happy to share the codeine with his Euro friends, he was surprised when their answer was basically a collective Non. “I guess they’re pretty reluctant to take [pain] pills over there,” Bryce explains. “They seem to think of it as a hard drug, like heroin or something.”
In the United States, we tend not to judge pill popping so harshly. In fact, according to a National Center on Addiction and Substance Abuse (CASA) at Columbia University study released in July, 15.1 million Americans – that’s six percent of the population – are now said to be addicted to prescription pills of some kind, a number that exceeds those abusing cocaine (5.9 million), hallucinogens (4.0 million), inhalants (2.1 million) and heroin (.3 million) combined. What’s more, emergency rooms have seen a nearly 80 percent increase in prescription pill related visits over the past decade. The 60s and 70s may have produced pot and acid heads, and the 80s may well be synonymous with the kind of Bolivian racing powder that writers like Jay McInerney and Bret Easton Ellis glorified, but today’s thrill-seekers are more likely to visit their MD for extra curricular chemicals than the dealer on the corner.
Articulate and savvy, this is a group that has seen the picture of the Vicodin pill on the cover of Eminem’s Slim Shady CD and can toss around words like “schedule two drugs,” “opiate base” and “hydrocodone” with the ease of your average med student.
