Drug abuser attributes survival to treatment

“Kids today start right in with OxyContin; they don’t stand a chance,” said Ben Silvernail. “They don’t know they’ll be hooked after a couple of weeks. They won’t be able to stop without help.”

Silvernail, 35, knows all too well what he’s talking about. In an interview, he acknowledged his longtime substance abuse, beginning when he was only 10 with alcohol and marijuana.

By 14, he had added LSD, cocaine and speed to his habits, and at 20 he entered a rehabilitation program for help in dealing with his alcoholism.

Silvernail’s tendencies toward substance abuse were offset by an ambitious entrepreneurial spirit. In the early 1990s, he started a construction business and built it into a 40-employee, $4 million enterprise in a few short years before it all fell apart.

In April 1995, he said, he took a fall off a scaffold, badly injuring his knees and shoulders. Over the next two years, he had 10 surgeries and “thousands of pills” – Vicodin, oxycodone and others.

“I still remember the first time I requested a prescription I didn’t need,” Silvernail said. After that, it was easy – he found a network of area physicians who were easily manipulated into prescribing nearly limitless amounts of prescription narcotics.

When OxyContin – the powerful, time-release version of oxycodone – came on the scene in 1997, Silvernail said area doctors seemed unaware of its lethally addictive qualities and even of its makeup. Knowing he already had a prescription for generic oxycodone, some physicians would still readily prescribe OxyContin to help manage his “pain.”

Others recognized his drug-seeking behavior and cautioned him to stop using – but often gave him more pills to help him “cut back.”

After a while, Silvernail said, he sincerely wanted to quit. But whatever resolve he could muster would fade as time rolled around for his next fix and the cravings and symptoms of withdrawal intensified.

“It’s a kind of painful grief,” Silvernail said. “It’s no longer about wanting to get high, it’s just about wanting to stop feeling so bad. You think if you can just get one more dose so you don’t feel so sick, you’ll find the strength to stop. But when you get that dose, you don’t care anymore, you don’t want to stop, until you start feeling sick again.”

Silvernail began dealing drugs in a big way to support his own habit. His business folded and his marriage failed. The turning point in his drug abuse came, he said, when he lost shared custody of his young son and even his limited visitation rights were threatened.

“I had thought about methadone,” he said, “but it had always seemed like just substituting one drug for another.” But when the clinic at Acadia opened in June 2001, Silvernail was among the first to apply. After a careful screening, he was accepted into the program, the clinic’s 26th client.

At a muscular 6 feet 3 inches and with a powerful vulnerability to addictive drugs, Silvernail has had to accept a higher dose than some users.

But that’s what it’s taken for him to begin rebuilding his business, to enter carefully into a new love relationship with another recovering addict – a practicing registered nurse with two young children – and to successfully regain shared custody of his own son.

Acadia staff, he said, stood beside him all the way as he navigated the legal system and demonstrated his commitment to being a responsible father.

“I’m a good parent, and now I have a wonderful relationship with my son,” he said. “The hardest thing in my life is knowing that I haven’t always been there for him.”

His life and his future back under his control, Silvernail and his life partner are building a new home for their combined families. On a recent wintry afternoon, Silvernail was preparing the foundation for the next-day delivery of a modular house. A builder with a modular home? “I’ve got other things to do,” Silvernail explained, acknowledging the irony. “Building a house takes too much time.”

He’s decided to go back to college, finish up his bachelor’s degree and continue into a doctoral program – a longtime dream of becoming a history professor has come into focus and now seems in reach.

“[Methadone] has allowed me to become the person I am,” Silvernail said, “to start to have things in my life that are worthwhile.

“I’d stay on methadone my whole life – I didn’t even have a life before. I was a huge detriment to society and would have wound up dead. … I would not be here alive if it weren’t for this program.”