Hooked on opiates: More legal use leads to more addiction, crimes, deaths

MaryJo Webster and Brandon Stahl:

Hannah Linderholm was a cheerleader and played sports in high school. She went to church every Sunday with her parents in New Prague and was excited about starting college.
“I had my life all together,” Linderholm, 21, said wistfully last week.
But in college, she fell for a guy who was getting high illegally on oxycodone, a highly controlled painkiller sold under the brand name Oxycontin, and she thought it would be OK to try it. “Then it just snowballed,” she said.
Within a year, she dropped out of college, had drained her savings account and was spending $180 a day to feed her body’s growing demand for the drug dubbed “oxy” on the street.
“All I wanted to do was get high,” she said. “I didn’t care about anything.”
Getting the pills was easy, Linderholm said, even though oxycodone can be obtained only with a doctor’s prescription. Her boyfriend had found a network of people willing to sell their prescriptions for $1 per milligram.