Rhonda Mann worked as the director of communications for the Massachusetts Office for Health and Human Services when the opioid crisis first started gaining attention here in 2007. Prior to that she was a broadcast health reporter and spent her life in health communications, but the crisis took even her by surprise.
Her daughter, Madyson Ohlman, began taking benzodiazepines as prescribed by her doctor for a panic disorder when she was just 10 years old.
Mann said the doctors increased her daughter’s prescribed doses throughout her teenage years, but she continued to struggle with anxiety and depression, despite counseling and treatment.
Then, she said, her daughter became involved in a relationship with someone who used the opioid painkiller Percocet. She said Ohlman began taking opioids, too, and moved on to injection drug use.
“It went from zero to 100 so quickly,” Mann said. “We just couldn’t get our arms around it.”
After many difficult struggles, Mann kicked her daughter out of the house with a painful epithet.
“I told her, ‘When you’re ready, go to the emergency room. Tell them you don’t feel safe, because that’s the only way they’ll keep you,’” she said, adding that it must truly be the person’s decision to begin and stick with the painful path of recovery.
Ohlman did just that when she hit what she called “spiritual bottom.”
“At that point, I was homeless, I was selling my body, I was stealing from my parents, I had no one. It was just a bottomless pit. Either I’m going to try to change, or I’m going to kill myself,” Ohlman, 27, said. “51 percent of me wanted to live … It’s hard to explain the feeling I had, but there was just that one extra percent that made me want to try to change.”
She just celebrated four years of being drug-free in October, and now lives in Falmouth, where she helps others through their recovery in a weekly Narcotics Anonymous group.
She said her recovery taught her she has the ability to work through her anxiety on her own without medication, but the road here has not only been painful, it’s been foggy.
“There’s a lot of things I really don’t remember, which is really sad. Some things I feel like I might have dreamed or that might have happened,” she said. “What really makes me upset … there’s so many other things you can do.
“Benzos should really only be prescribed for a short period of time, for emergencies. They took a huge chunk out of my life; I couldn’t work through any of my problems when I was on them.”
That’s because, she said, benzos work.
“They work very well. I would take one, the anxiety would go away, then it would wear off and I’d start to feel panic coming back and I’d need to take another one. That was pretty consistent for 10 years.”
Ohlman said her doctors continued to increase her prescription for Xanax over those 10 years, though she acknowledges that 17 years ago there was less information about overprescribing and the dangers of prescription drugs. By age 19, when she was first introduced to Percocet, she said, she was taking three bars of Xanax, the highest dose at 2 milligrams a day.
The first time she took Percocet, she said, she got sick, threw up, and “loved it.” It was the beginning of her addiction, she said.
“I always took my benzos as prescribed, probably because I didn’t have to abuse them; I was prescribed so many,” she said. “It never occured to me that it could be an issue, that those two drugs could become a problem, or I guess I just didn’t care. Benzos, they make you not care, about anything.”
She said she thinks her doctors started to realize she was a drug addict at age 21 and that’s why they ended her Xanax prescription, putting her in detox in a hospital for 10 days so she wouldn’t have seizures from the benzodiazepine withdrawal.
It was after that detox that she began injecting harder drugs.
“She could have been one of the statistics,” Mann said. “She was definitely prescribed way too much (Xanax). Whether that led her into more substantial drug use? Well, I think it did.”
Ohlman said she’s concerned that information about the dangers of benzos isn’t getting out there. She said high school students prescribed benzos should know that the drugs can impair driving and can be deadly when mixed with alcohol.
And opioid users? They need to know, she said, and they need to care.
“Benzos and opiates go hand in hand right now. They’re absolutely a deadly combination, especially with heroin, and I don’t think that’s getting out as much as it should,” Ohlman said.
M.J. Tidwell writes for the Gazette from the Boston University Statehouse Program.