They sat in a log cabin set in the middle of a 68-acre tree farm in Hall County. No getaway, mind you, the sober dwelling represents a hard-core reality that Justin Williams and Patrick True share as users.

To provide knowledge, maybe even a lesson, they offered their stories about prescription pill abuse.
"I had life sentences in my car at times," said Justin Williams, 28.

He acted as a "mule" when he drove from Georgia to Florida to collect and transport sandwich bags filled with thousands of pills.

"My payment was in pills," Williams said, naming Oxycontin, also known as oxycodone, as his drug of choice.

He knew how to buy pills on the Internet; how much money a single pill commanded on the street; how to sell pills for profit in order to offset losses as a user. Most of all, Williams knew what doctors to go to and what symptoms to embody.

"There were five or six doctors in my local area who would prescribe anything I asked, and they would meet me on Sundays," Williams said, explaining the practice as "doctor shopping."

"They were in it for the money."

He is a recovering addict of two years and works as a graphic designer at 3 Dimensional Life on the outskirts of Gainesville. He also serves as a teacher and mentor for young men ages 14-20 who are part of the secluded recovery program there.

Patrick True, 19, is one of those teens. True is a recovering addict of five months who can vividly recall his affairs with heroin, and in its absence, Oxycontin.

His drug use started in middle school with alcohol and steadily progressed, beginning with pills rifled from a medicine cabinet belonging to his friend's mother.

"I thought I was going to be a heroin addict for the rest of my life," True said. "This is how I'm going to die, with a needle in my arm."

To ward off withdrawal pain, True turned to Oxycontin as a last resort to make his body feel better somehow.

"You have to have it to get out of bed," True said. "Withdrawal from opiates, you feel like you're dying."

Pills post a challenge
The characteristics of drug use presented by Williams and True reflect the challenging abuses that face law enforcement.

True said he gained access to pills as a kid, through unsuspecting parents and grandparents. His addictions spiraled thereafter.

Williams, an adult for most of his heavy drug use, found his own ways of securing his prescriptions, or another person's. Some of those methods were technically legal.

Users have to be caught in the act, found in possession of pills prescribed to someone else or found in possession of too many pills under their own name to be charged with such a drug crime, said Lt. Scott Ware, Hall County Multi-Agency Narcotics Squad unit commander.

"It's very tricky when they have a valid prescription," Ware said. "The drugs are legal when they are prescribed. It's not like cocaine or methamphetamine, where possession at all is illegal."

Pain pills and antidepressants are the prescription meds most people desire, with Oxycontin serving as the heavyweight in the toxic mix, Ware added.

"(Pill use) poses more of a threat to our youth safety than our illicit drugs do," Ware said. "The problem that we've seen is that young people who are taking the medication and have overdosed and died were mixing medications and alcohol."

A side issue with prescription drug abusers relates to those same men and women dealing pills in order to fuel their own habit, said Sgt. Kevin Gaddis, a Gainesville Police Department officer who also works with the MANS unit.

Rampant teenage use presents a myriad of unique problems as well.

They can acquire pills with relative ease, compared with booze or street drugs. They can conceal it better. And they also justify use as medication.

"Especially with kids they say, ‘Well, it's a legal drug, it's written by a doctor, so it can't hurt me,'" Gaddis said. "They don't look at it as being an illicit drug such as meth or heroin."

Medication cabinets replace the streets
Rick Allen is a 35-year veteran of a state agency called Georgia Drugs and Narcotics Agency. He is the director, a licensed pharmacist and peace officer.

How his office is called to investigate places that dispense narcotics has changed dramatically over decades.

"When I first started, pharmacists were supplying Georgia rock bands or groupies with drugs and dirty doctors who were supplying quaaludes to movies stars," he said. "Most people were (using) street-type drugs. In time, people have learned prescription drugs are out there, too."

Oxycontin was the "bell ringer," Allen said, that escalated such abuses.

Younger users, in particular, caught on to medications readily available in their parents' medicine cabinets.

"It was originally developed for patients with chronic pain, and for hospice patients," he said.

"It just became wildly popular."

To address what has been identified by state leaders as an epidemic, Allen joined a host of key experts and law enforcement officials in Atlanta on March 2 to discuss the issue of prescription drug abuse in Georgia and its fallout.

There they agreed to push for funding that would establish a prescription monitoring program, which would network pharmacies in Georgia as well as other states.

In the meantime, agencies are sharing information of all kinds on these abuses. County coroners have been asked for their overdose statistics. Georgia State Patrol troopers are reporting serious or fatal accidents in which prescription medication may have been a cause. And complaints are finding Allen's agency quickly when so called "pill mills" open.

These are cash-only outfits where pills are sometimes dispensed illegally. Right now there are between 30 and 40 around Atlanta, he said. The only one known to have opened in Gainesville was promptly shut down at the end of last summer for violating operational laws, Allen said. The case remains under investigation.

"(They're) going to pop up in Gainesville," he said. "But police in Georgia talk to each other. We all know we're having trouble. ... It's taken this epidemic to bring us all together."

Hope and moving on
As Williams and True volunteered their stories, teens and young men who are part of the 3 Dimensional Life program worked on various projects outside.

The peer-based focus at the center revolves around choices as well as faith.

"We deal with students who either have addictive lifestyle or have made destructive choices. Most of the time it has started with a cigarette or alcohol.

Here lately we've seen a transition of that into prescript drug use," said Greg Brooks, executive director. "We focus more on purpose."

Looking ahead with hope is a learning process, the men agreed.

They each know friends who died as a result of drug abuses similar to their own.

And though True mourns their loss, he views his past as building him into a stronger person today.

"I'm tired of (the deaths). It affects me," he said. "But those are old friends. I have to move on from there. I have to worry about me now."