Write That Drug Story Real — All of It

I read last week's Hollywood Reporter to learn about Drugstory.org. The full-page ad told us "How to pace your character's dive down the K-Hole." The ad reported that Special K is "springwater laced with puppy tranquilizer," and taking it leads a dance floor party animal down the K-Hole to see "before your eyes, children flattened and pulled apart like soggy bread. This hallucinated hell lasts 24 hours, and so the next morning the victim has no recollection of the ride, the rave, or how they were raped."

Whew. I'm thinking my character is changed for life by something like that. Pacing could be a problem. Better save the K-Hole hell for a key point of the story.

The Drugstory.org site, run by the US Office of National Drug Control Policy, puts writers in touch with experts to explain how drug users live and what their drugs of choice do to them. More touching are the personal tribute Web sites linked inside Drugstory.org, places like the Courage to Speak Foundation, built around the death of a woman's son though a heroin overdose.

The Reporter ad promised first-person accounts of drug use. Even the second-person stories were gripping, like Jo Payne's account of raising her grandchild Colby when his mom died after 20 years of using drugs like meth.

But not everything chronicled comes off the dance floor. One story included prescription pill abuse; another article talked about the problem of getting prescription drugs from outside the US. A Washington Post reporter took note of the US FDA personal-use exemption, revised in 1988 "when AIDS was surging and domestic treatments were scarce. The FDA responded by saying that patients with life-threatening illnesses under a doctor's care could import a few months' worth of medications, even if the drugs were not approved in the United States." Mexican shops now sell prescription drugs at prices more people can afford.

We all know where that's led. Now pharmaceutical companies are working hard to close down the source of cheaper drugs. They even have hired a former Louisiana congressman as president of their 15-company lobby. The congressman got more than $90 grand from drug companies during his last re-election campaign, then took a seat on the committee with jurisdiction over the drug industry. Now he makes $2 million a year as head of the lobby. Apparently there's another kind of hell hole related to a drug story — the tale of how corporate drug profits remain protected by locking the gates against cheaper drugs from offshore.