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Recovery in the News
The White-Coated Drug Addicts
Jean Marbella
The Baltimore Sun
October 4, 2009
They had him cold. A secret camera caught the pharmacist helping himself to drugs off the shelves and downing them on the job. He was taken away in handcuffs and arrested, but on the second day of his trial, he got off with a light prison sentence, probation and regular drug testing.
It barely broke his stride, and he soon landed another job in another pharmacy. Prison? The judge let him serve his term on weekends. Drug testing?
"I put my knowledge of pharmacology to good use," Jared Combs says. "A lot of drugs I selected were ones that have short half-lives. I would take pills before going to jail, but then they didn't last through the weekend, so I started smuggling the drugs into jail with me."
It would take another couple years of swallowing, snorting and injecting prescription drugs on and off the job, and another group of cops showing up with handcuffs before Combs, now 37 years old, would acknowledge his addiction, check into a monthlong treatment program followed by a stay in a halfway house and get to the point where he will celebrate nine years of sobriety this Wednesday.
He said he never harmed or killed a customer by giving out incorrect dosages or drugs while under their influence himself. As his addiction worsened, he's certain he was headed to an overdose or other fatal accident had he not gotten help in time.
In Baltimore last week, a pharmacology researcher at the University of Maryland School of Medicine died after injecting herself with a prescription narcotic. As it turned out, she and her boyfriend, also a postdoc researcher at UM, were regular drug users, police said, growing marijuana in their rowhouse and buying online narcotics such as OxyContin and buprenorphine - which is what Carrie John was injecting before she died.
In a city where we think we know what drug addiction looks like - a wasted crackhead or heroin user staggering down some bombed-out-looking inner city street - the highly degreed researchers in their Ridgely's Delight rowhouse don't fit the picture.
It shouldn't be surprising that white-coated professionals are no less immune to the lure of drugs or the disease of addiction than the rest of us - and, in fact, TV has made this quite the staple character, from Percocet-snorting Nurse Jackie to Vicodin-hallucinating Dr. House. And yet it's hard to imagine how, in real life at least, an impaired medical professional can function in such exacting jobs.
You can, but only up to a certain point, says Combs, whom I spoke with by phone as he was driving to an Alcoholics Anonymous meeting in Lexington, Ky., one of several he attends every week as part of his recovery. I had found him through the Pharmacists Recovery Network, which helps those in the field with addiction issues.
While Combs' situation differs from that of John and her boyfriend, Clinton McCracken - he dispenses drugs in a pharmacy, they did research in a lab - he suspects they viewed their drug use much as he did his own.
"I think it shows the confidence we have in our education," Combs said. " 'I'm smart, I know all about these drugs, I know how to use them.' "
Either through luck or knowledge, Combs managed to keep his growing addiction to narcotics secret for months at a time. It was only weeks into his first job after becoming a licensed pharmacist that he started taking a painkiller, Lortab, as a way of feeling up to what could often be a fast-paced and stressful job. Working a 2 p.m.-to-10 p.m. shift at a clinic, he often was alone and, eventually, the pills he took for occasional anxious times became habitual.
But he started making mistakes, including once dispensing a heart medication, quinidine, instead of quinine, for leg cramps - and literally jumped over the counter and chased the customer in the parking lot to retrieve it. Or customers would return and say, "Usually I get a pink tablet, and this time it's brown," he said.
But he got caught only by accident. The pharmacy was burglarized overnight, and there were suspicions that the criminals had some inside assistance. Employees were asked to take a polygraph, but Combs, fearing his pilfering of drugs for his own use would be revealed, refused. Between that and the fact that he had locked up the night of the burglary made him a prime suspect. (He said he had nothing to do with the burglary.)
He was questioned, but the investigation seemed to die down. A camera, though, had been installed in the pharmacy, and it caught him using. Authorities ultimately decided they couldn't pin the burglary on him but had him on camera using, so they offered to let him go with probation, drug testing and four weekends in jail.
Somehow, he managed to get another job, from a pharmacist with a big heart - "he told me he was always for the underdog" - who took a chance on him, and Combs resumed his career and his drug use. Coupled with heavy drinking, he eventually started blacking out - one day finding a speeding ticket in his pocket but no memory of how he got it, another morning waking up in jail and again with no idea what landed him there.
It turned out to be a bar fight, and police found a bag of Sonata, a prescription sleep aid, on him. He was arrested again, his wife threatened to leave with the kids and he lost his license.
That got him on the road to recovery, and, over time, he regained his license, with five years of supervision and random drug screenings. For the past six years, he's worked at the University of Kentucky as a hospital pharmacist. Although he's gotten as close as slipping a pill in his pocket, he said he's had no relapses.
But the temptation is always there, more so for alcohol than drugs. "They're everywhere, the billboards with the frosty glasses," he says ruefully. He counts on his faith, his family's support and his recovery group meetings to help him resist the drugs that are just a weak moment away from his grasp every day at work.
He self-published a memoir last year, "Incomprehensible Demoralization: An Addict Pharmacist's Journey to Recovery." But he's thinking of changing the title to the more easily comprehended "Keys to the Candy Store."
Copyright © 2009, The Baltimore Sun