Road to recovery

“Death Spiral” [Feb. 10] did an excellent job of saying what we who are in recovery from prescription drug addiction already know all too well -- the rampant and growing danger of Rx drug abuse among people in all walks of life.

Prescription opiates are every bit as dangerous as heroin, but our “pushers” are the physicians who, sometimes knowingly, sometimes out of ignorance or apathy, give them away like candy.

There is not yet any national Pills Anonymous organization (a la Alcoholics Anonymous), but there are 40-plus meetings that have sprung up independently nationwide and that network with one another via the website www.pillsanonymous.com.

Twenty-one of those meetings are in Southern California, most of those started in the last five to 10 years.

Many prescription drug abusers, who are either still using or newly stopped, come to www.pillsanonymous.com to hear the experience, strength and hope of its recovering members and also to find out if there’s a PA meeting near them and/or learn how to recover using the meetings of other substance abuse programs, even if their own primary problem is pills.

Jonathan B.

Sierra Madre