Mike Majlak - The Fifth Vital

Mike Majlak

with Riley J. Ford

First and foremost, I would like to thank each and every individual portrayed in this book for being a part of my journey and allowing me to be part of theirs. I recognize that their memories of the events described in this book may be different than my own, but I highly doubt it. To be perfectly clear, this book is a memoir, creative nonfiction, and reflects my present recollections of experiences over time, and frankly, much of that time may or may not have been spent under the influence or fighting to reclaim my own mental health. To that end, and to protect myself and the innocent (and not so innocent), some names and characteristics have been changed to protect the privacy of the people involved, some events have been compressed, and some dialogue has been paraphrased. With that, you the reader have become part of the journey. For that I am truly grateful and excited to see where you take my humbling experiences and use them to improve your own.

Mike Majlak

Copyright 2020 Mike Majlak with Riley J. Ford

EPUB Edition

Cover art by Sarah Hansen of Okay Creations. Cover art copyright 2020 Sarah Hansen.

Photo credit: Maclin Bilski

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by electronic or mechanical means, including information storage and retrieval systemsexcept in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical articles or reviewswithout permission in writing from the author.

This book is for the millions of people worldwide who struggle with mental illness, addiction, and hopelessness. I pray my story offers you a little warmth in a cold world.

Dont let your light go out.

In our lives, we all suffer. For some, the experience of painwhether physical or psychologicalis blessedly short-lived. For others, it can be an enduring life sentence of torture.

Pain is the physical or psychological suffering that reduces a persons quality of life. The opposite of suffering is happiness. If human beings are to live full, happy, productive lives, then pain must be addressed in all its origins, causes, significance, management, and remedies.

According to Viktor Frankl, a Holocaust survivor and philosopher, Meaning is possible even in spite of sufferingprovided that the suffering is unavoidable. If it were avoidable, however, the meaningful thing to do would be to remove its cause.

In the 1990s, pain was thought to be undertreated in the health-care field, so American medical professionals began looking for ways to eliminate pain in patients. In 1995, Purdue Pharma released OxyContin, a powerful painkiller, to the public. Purdue Pharma actively and unethically marketed this opioid as an innocuous drug that could be safely used to treat pain in a wide variety of people and conditions without the risk of addiction.

In 2001, pain was newly classified as the fifth vital sign by the Joint Commission, the countrys leading accrediting body for hospitals that helps health-care systems improve performance. The four other vital signsbody temperature, blood pressure, breathing rate, and pulse ratecontinue to be definitively measured in order to know the state of a persons essential body functions. With good intentions designed to ease suffering, the medical field tried to measure pain, by asking patients to rate it on a scale of smiley-faces and frowny faces from none to severe. This has erroneously led to the idea that patients can become completely pain free.

Unfortunately, pain and suffering cannot be objectively measured. They are subjective.

The promise of drugsopioids in particularwas to release the American people from their pain and suffering. Instead, opioids have become a death sentence for countless human beings. Overdose deaths from opioids, including painkillers, heroin, and synthetics like fentanyl, have increased exponentially every year since the release of OxyContin. Opioids kill more than forty thousand Americans each year. They annually take the lives of more people than cars or guns.

When a plane goes down and kills three hundred people, it becomes headline news. The drug deaths of forty thousand people a year in todays current condemnatory climate is sadly nothing more than a passing sound bite. But the deaths of so many human beings cant be dismissed. It is an epidemic. It is a tragedy. Statistically, most opioid users are young peopleour sons, daughters, sisters, and brothers. We are losing our future generations to opioid addiction and overdoses. In our societal and personal quest to eliminate pain, we have created a larger, deeper kind of endless sufferingthe destruction of lives, the demise of family structures, and the deaths of people we know and love.

In understanding and managing our human pain from physical ailments, broken hearts, mental illness, or human existence, I hope we will one day find effective ways to relieve our suffering. Part of that is accepting that the human condition invariably involves some degree of suffering. We cant eliminate it completely. Its how we manage the pain that is the question. As a recovering opioid addict who has successfully climbed out of the depths of agony and darkness, I can unequivocally say that human connection can be one of the most powerful antidotes to human suffering and pain.

In summarizing the opioid crisis that continues to take so many lives, I leave you with another quote from Viktor Frankl: For what matters is to bear witness to the uniquely human potential at its best, which is to transform a personal tragedy into triumph, to turn ones predicament into a human achievement. When we are no longer able to change a situationwe are challenged to change ourselves.

I was just a child when the drug company Purdue Pharma unleashed a tidal wave of the powerful narcotic OxyContin into Milford, Connecticut, the small town where I lived. My community wasnt alone. Every city in the United States was affected by what would become the largest drug crisis in U.S. history.

By the time the government and the American population discovered the true danger of OxyContin, it was too late. When Purdue Pharma was convicted in 2007 for misrepresenting the risk of OxyContin and forced to pay $600 million in fines, the majority of Oxy addicts had already switched to heroin and powerful synthetic narcotics such as fentanyl. By 2016, there were more than 289 million prescriptions written each year for opioids and over 2.1 million opioid addicts.

By 2017 at the peak of the epidemic, Purdue Pharma was still actively promoting OxyContin and misleading doctors. Opioid overdoses had become the leading cause of accidental death in the United States. Between 1999 and 2019, almost one million Americans had died from accidental overdoses, 450,000 from opioids alone. The death rates were so high that they depressed the average life expectancy in America for many years in a row.

My loving, middle-class childhood could never have prepared me for what was waiting around the corner for me, my friends, and my family as opioids began to find a foothold in our town. There was no way to foresee that my friends and Ijust average teenagerswould unwittingly get caught up in a drug epidemic that would have far-reaching consequences on all our lives. Eventually, I would go from a normal, happy kid who played basketball, hung out with my friends, and got good grades in school to a full-fledged opioid addict and drug dealer. My teens and early twenties would come to resemble a wastelanda horror story that took place right in my hometown.