Its 8:00 PM and I am sitting in my car in an empty parking lot, covered in white powder, razor blade in my hand, and a little plastic baggie filled with non-descript pills in my lap. Despite the appearance, if a cop were to search my car, or even investigate everything fully, they would find everything on the up and up. To understand why, you need to understand the “Placebo Effect”.

For the uninitiated, the “Placebo Effect” is when the mind and body are tricked into repairing themselves when they believe they are actually getting effective treatment, when they are not. So powerful is this effect, that pharmaceutical manufacturers must test each drug against a placebo to make sure that their drug is indeed more effective than, say, an Altoid. This is not a story of how placebos work, however, but how I became a big time placebo dealer.

Five months ago, my girlfriend came down with a bad case of spinal meningitis. For those of you unfamiliar with this condition, it is basically an infection of the spinal fluid. There are two forms of spinal meningitis: Bacterial and Viral. The bacterial variety is particularly nasty, while the viral version frequently goes away by itself. As it is important for doctors to know which of these two they are dealing with, they often perform what is called a spinal tap, which involves sticking a needle into your spine and drawing out fluid. This was not fun to watch, and probably far worse to have done.

What they don’t warn you about prior to the spinal tap is that, unlike blood, spinal fluid does not clot and does not scab. Basically, what this means is once you poke a hole in your spinal column, it is really hard to stop it from leaking. What they also don’t warn you is that this fluid is the same fluid that surrounds your brain and stops it from rattling against your skull when you are nodding your head that you would like that second dose of morphine when you see the needle for the first time.

When this hole that the doctors left in your back leaks enough spinal fluid, and there isn’t enough pressure left to stop your brain from rattling around, you start getting headaches. Pretty serious headaches. Not the “oh my god, I will never drink that much again” variety, but the “seeing stars, wishing you were dead kind of migraine” headaches. It is at this time that the doctor does what he should have done in the first place and injects some of your own blood over the hole to create a scab that seals it up finally. After that, it is just a waiting game to see how quickly your body can reproduce those fluids.

For my girlfriend, this meant some pretty major doses of Vicodin in order to make it through the day. The doctor presecribed about two days worth of the fun little pills. When these were gone, she called the doctor for a refill, which he happily did. Another day and a half worth. Two days later, she was calling him again. This time, he gave her another day, but it was clearly more reluctantly than the first time. It was clear to me that the doctor was concerned that he may have a Vicodin addict on his hands, which, in my opinion was pretty ridiculous as we were now getting the pills one day at a time, and he had first hand knowledge why they were needed.

She decided to try and wait it out, but at around 10 o’clock at night, she couldn’t take it any more. I knew that if we called an on-call doctor at 10 o’clock at night, this would certainly raise a red flag. This was one of those turning point moments for me. A moment I reflect on every day these days.

I decided to visit a Walgreens and see if I could get some over the counter pain relievers that would pass for Vicodin, that I would put in the bottle and see if this worked I picked up a small bottle of “Extra Strength Tylenol” scrapped the little logo printed on the “caplets” and place them in the old bottle. She was in too much pain to be very observant about what was written on the bottle, after all. Or so I thought.

About a day later, she came to me and asked why the bottle did not have a new date on it. It is at times like these that I wish I were a better liar. I told her that I got them from a friend of mine who had some to spare, and put them in the bottle. Surprisingly enough, this actually worked. I am pretty sure that if I had tried to pass this off when she was well, it would have gone over like the led balloon it was. She accepted them as being the Vicodin that they were supposed to be, though. A few days later, when she asked if I could get some more from my “source”, I fugured “no harm, no foul”.

The only problem was, doing this two day supply thing was getting really old. So, my next step down this dark path was to buy a bottle of about sixty, scrape the logos off, one by one, and give them to her. This spread out the pain of the pill assembly to about once every couple of weeks. That was, until she asked me for more after only a couple of days. The reason, she explained, is that a friend of hers had a bad back, and no insurance, so she gave her dose to her friend, who was much better now.

Wow. Now I was supplying two people with regular Tylenol, and both were responding like it was the “by prescription only” drug it was supposed to be. Given this new wrinkle, I decided to go in whole hog and I shelled out for the 225 pill bottle of Extra Strength Tylenol. I sat industriously in my car, scraping the logos off one at a time so that any evidence of its origin were erased. I even shelled out for the special “snack size” zip lock baggies to add to the entire “drug dealer” appearance. When I left my car, my clothes were covered in Tylenol powder.

So, understanding that my “network” had doubled in size, I really didn’t pay too much attention as my orders started comming in more rapidly as the weeks went on. Each “order” came in a few days earlier than the previous. I finally noticed when, after “delivering” an order of around 200 pills, she was back asking for more. I was asking mainly out of concern, because 100 Tylenol in one week can cause liver damage.

Not to worry, though. She wasn’t taking too many. In fact, she claimed that if she took more than three in one day, she would start to get “loopy”. This was good news and bad news. Good news in the respect that she wasn’t abusing the meds, but bad news that if she ever saw through my little ruse, I was certainly going to get killed. Nobody wants to realize that, no, it wasn’t the three Tylenol you had today that got you “loopy”. That was just your normal personality shining through your normal excuses for inhabitions.

The reason she had gone through so many was that I was now not only was I supplying her, and her friend, but her friends boyfriend, her boss, and somebody else at work. Five people. That I know of.

At a party last week, I had a friend of a friend pull me aside. He said that he was looking for Vicodin, and that he didn’t have any money, but that he would be interested in trade for pot, which he had a regular supply of. I asked him why he was asking me, and he told me that he had gotten some of the pills that I had supplied from someone else, and that he needed more. By this time, I have been gradually improving my lying skills, so I told him that I was worried that my supplier was starting to get worried that the amount of “Vicodin” I was starting to move might start to raise suspicions, so I didn’t want to push it by asking for more than I was already getting.

So, here I am. In a car. Covered in white powder from scraping off the little logos on Extra Strength Tylenol pills. I have to vacuum and wipe down my car out regularly, or the power will start to accumulate like so much snow in the dead of winter. I have to retreat to empty parking lots, lest I am discovered by somebody I know. I live in fear of being caught, just like a real drug dealer, only I wont fact prison time. Just the wrath of about eight people that constitute my whole social life. I am not doing anything illegal, I think. At least, I know that nobody that I will be upsetting by doing this will press charges against me.

I am not a real drug dealer. I just play one on TV.

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