Amanda began abusing ­prescription drugs at age 14. Over the next three years, her habit worsened, and so did her life.

She skipped school, her grades dropped, and she fought with her family — eventually moving out.

“The first thing I did when I left home was make a call to see if I could get some pills,” she says. “The first week I was gone, things were good. I could get pills, and I thought I had it made. I felt like things were perfect.”

They weren’t.

At the peak of her addiction, she was spending $200 to $250 a day on a habit that controlled, consumed and nearly destroyed her.

“I pawned all my jewelry, traded or sold all my electronics,” she says. “I got rid of a laptop, a BlackBerry, an iPod, my Nintendo DS, my friend’s laptop. I stole from a woman and got a bunch of jewelry and pawned it all too.”

She lost everything.

But what makes Amanda (not her real name) different is that she sought help, says Detective Jerry Aponte, of the Moore County Sheriff’s Office.

“When we bust somebody and they say, ‘I’m going to get help. I’m going to get help,’ we’re like, ‘Look, here’s my card. If you want help, call me and I’ll point you in the right direction,’” Aponte says. “I never get that phone call.”

Amanda has been clean and sober for nearly six months. She is part of a multi-pronged, communitywide effort to battle prescription drug abuse in Moore County.

“The direction she is going now is a positive one,” Aponte says. “The first step is always the hardest one. Everyone is afraid of what’s ahead, and you don’t want to go back because you know what’s there.”

Prescription drug abuse is all-encompassing. It spans all ages, races and socioeconomic boundaries. But the problem is not new to Moore County law enforcement agencies.

Capt. Jerrell Seawell, of the Moore County Sheriff’s Office, says law enforcement agencies have been aware of the problem since 2003.

“We are becoming an overmedicated society,” he says. “There are pills out there for any problem that you may be facing.”

Seawell says the biggest abuse is predominantly pain medications, such as Percocet, Lorcet and other oxycodones and hydrocodones. Other pills that are commonly abused are “downers” such as Xanax and Lorazepam, he says.

“I know these medications are meant for good, but there is a danger associated with them because of the addictive nature of those pain pills,” Seawell says.

Seawell says his department has eight officers working “constantly” on prescription pill cases. One investigator is dedicated solely to prescription fraud and doctor shopping.

“Eight to 15 years ago, the problem with pills was nothing like what we are seeing today,” he says. “Now everyone is after prescription pills.”

Two years ago, the Sheriff’s Office stopped taking reports of stolen medication because, Seawell says, it received so many false reports.

Pills, he says, are easy to obtain because society as a whole doesn’t perceive sharing medications to be illegal.

Whether it’s someone lending a friend one of their prescription pain pills, someone selling prescription medication, or drug dealers diversifying their offerings, prescription pills are omnipresent in drug investigations.

Seawell says people abusing prescription drugs do things they normally wouldn’t do.

“You’re never surprised,” Seawell says. “When you think you’ve heard the whole magnitude of the problem, someone will tell you about how many people are abusing or how many people are selling, and the things they are doing, like larcenies and break-ins, that they are doing because they are taking pills.”

Body and Mind

Addiction to prescription drugs had a profound effect on Amanda, who was a good student and loved playing sports.

“Every part of me changed,” she says.

When she first started abusing prescription drugs, she says she had energy to burn. She cleaned her room and her home all the time.

The newness of the buzz soon wore off, and she needed larger doses to achieve the same effect. Then before too long, she was taking such a high volume of drugs that she lapsed into a near-permanent, fog-headed, lethargic state.

Addiction grabbed hold of her body and mind.

“Not only did I enjoy the pills, but I was so used to snorting something that I would crave snorting something,” she says. “There were times when I wasn’t living at home, and I ran out of pills and I didn’t have any money, that I would get a Tylenol, crush it and snort it because it helped my mind.”

She has been through rehab, and says she’s been clean and sober for nearly six months. But her mind and body still bear the scars of years of drug abuse. She says she has memory loss, and cartilage in her nose is damaged to the point that her nose sometimes “bleeds for no reason.”

“If you could stand outside your body and watch yourself use,” she says, “it would be so much easier to quit because you could see yourself go downhill and stop it before it got too hard, but you can’t do that.”

‘Many Fronts’

From 2003 to 2008, the Moore County Sheriff’s Office seized an average of 1,671 prescription pills.

“It’s not a new problem,” Seawell says. “We’ve been aggressively pursuing it for years now.”

In 2009, that number jumped to about 5,000, and last year officers seized 10,134 pills.

“Back in 2009, and early 2010, that is when I said, ‘Man, we really need to start doing something else besides just enforcement,” he says.

In 2009, Seawell and others at the Moore County Sheriff’s Office, including Sheriff Lane Carter, determined that they needed to attack the prescription pill problem on a broader front rather than just the enforcement side of things.

“There are many fronts in the battle against prescription pills, and you are not going to win it (by fighting) on just one front,” Seawell says.

They have reached out to the medical community and the community at large through organizations such as the Drug Free Moore County Coalition, the Moore County Drug Prevention Task Force and others.

Part of that awareness includes letting residents know that sharing of medications is illegal and that they need to secure their medications.

The groups also conduct medicine drops to collect pills and work to educate students, parents and community groups on the dangers of prescription drug abuse.

Last year, medicine drops in March and September collected 127,523 pills. This year, a medicine drop in March collected another 106.365 dosage units.

Roxanne Leopper, of the Moore County Drug Prevention Task Force, says the medicine drops are just one tool to help educate residents and raise awareness.

“People are probably more aware that they should dispose of unused or unwanted medications, and more people know that there is a proper way to dispose of them,” she says.

The task force, along with Drug Free Moore County, was instrumental in obtaining grant money to purchase a permanent collection bin for prescription medications, which is located outside the Sheriff’s Office in Carthage. Since it was installed earlier this year, more than 23,000 dosage units of prescription pills have been dropped off.

“Our whole thing is to get people to secure their medications and properly dispose of their unwanted medications,” says Darlind Davis of Drug Free Moore County.

At home, Seawell says, residents should lock up or secure their medications to prevent someone from taking them. He urges residents not to share medications under any circumstance.

“People don’t think there is anything wrong with sharing their medications,” Seawell says. “But if you start giving someone medication that a doctor has prescribed for you, you don’t know how the person you are giving the pills to will react to the medication.”

Leopper says, “I think we have increased some level of awareness of the problem.”

Seawell says the information has made a “big difference.”

“A couple of years ago, very few people had knowledge about the dangers of these pills unless they were abusers or sellers,” Seawell says.

‘Not In Control’

Amanda’s descent into addiction started innocently.

As a high school freshman, she hung out with older kids, mostly juniors and seniors. She says they would occasionally offer her prescription pills.

“They started getting more and asking me more, and I started doing more,” she says.

By the time she was a sophomore, she started buying her own pills — Lorcet, Percocet, Oxycontin and others.

“My 11th grade year, I was either skipping school to find pills or I was skipping to take pills,” she says.

She recalls a party where she and another person combined a variety of pills, crushed them up, put them all in a big line and snorted them.

“Each person started at one end of the line, and whoever could snort the most got the most,” she says. “At that time, I didn’t care who got the most, but when I started getting worse, I started getting stingy and didn’t want to share.”

She began to recognize she had a drug problem thanks to a phone call from her family.

“One day, my two little siblings called me, crying,” Amanda says. “They asked me if I was on drugs and when I was coming home. I knew I had to stop because it’s not fair to my family.”

After that phone call, Amanda says she understood a sobering reality about her addiction.

“I knew I wasn’t in control of it anymore,” she says.

It took a few weeks, but Amanda finally called her mother and asked if she could come home, with the caveat that her mother would make arrangements for her to enter into drug treatment. She went through detox for four days and then went into rehab for three weeks.

She says withdrawal is one of the hardest things about getting clean. Withdrawal is different for everyone. Some get sick to their stomach and throw up. Other symptoms include cold sweats, fever and mood swings

“(Quitting) is not hard, but it isn’t easy,” she says. “You have to have willpower. Peer pressure has been my problem, but now I feel like I can say no.”

After Amanda got clean and returned home, her mother, who works at FirstHealth Moore Regional Hospital, told her just how much she worried about her daughter.

“She told me that after I moved out, every day she would go to work and check the ER list to make sure I wasn’t on it,” Amanda says.

Reaching Children

Communicating the dangers of prescription drug abuse to children in Moore County is a key issue identified by the Drug Free Moore County Coalition and the Moore County Drug Prevention Task Force.

“We constantly conduct focus groups with children and they always tell us we need to start earlier,” Davis says.

Getting information to students and their parents has been a big initiative. Another key component of battling the issue in schools is conducting medicine drops, daylong events that set up collection points for drugs.

This past April, the Moore County school system collected 52,294 dosage units during a medicine drop event that was held at North Moore, Pinecrest and Union Pines high schools.

Sammy McNeill, director of school resource officers, attributes the success of the April medicine drop to the hard work and dedication of three seniors. Tashonna Farmer, of North Moore, April Green, of Union Pines, and Jonathan Cruz, of Pinecrest, helped organize the event as part of their senior projects.

The students took part in Drug Free Moore County Coalition meetings, did countless hours of research on prescription drugs and drug abuse, and had firsthand access to law enforcement agencies throughout the county as part of the senior project.

McNeill says that immersion in their subject matter was “instrumental” to the success of the overall project.

“All three of them did a great job, and I am very proud of them,” McNeill says. “I think it was a very good life lesson for all of them. I think the project really opened their eyes to some things that are out there (in the community) that they otherwise may have been shielded from.”

Amanda says the drug problem in the schools is worse and more widespread than many think.

“I could walk in there (old high school) right now, and I could walk down any hallway, and there would be probably five people in each hallway that would have something or know someone who could get something,” she says.

She says a big problem is that most parents, like her mother, are in denial about the problem.

“I did my first pill when I was 14,” she says. “When I was 16 or 17, my mom asked me if I had ever done pills, and I said no, and she said, ‘Good, I never thought you did them.’

“A lot of parents think their kids aren’t going to do them. I remember kids at school getting caught with pills, and I’ve heard their parents in the front office saying it wasn’t my child or that other kids pinned it on my child.”

Carthage Police Sgt. John Gibbons, who also works as a school resource officer, says Amanda is a big asset in battling the drug problem because of her ability to relate to students.

“I can call her if I have somebody who’s in it or who is getting in the pill thing, and she’ll come in and speak to them for me,” Gibbons says. “That is a real big thing.”

New Path

Though she still faces some legal issues related to her drug abuse, Amanda has taken huge steps to reclaim her life.

She reunited with her family, has steady employment, has a vehicle and is pursuing her GED. She was three credits short of graduation when she dropped out of school.

Now that she has turned her life around, Amanda says she is facing issues head on. She says she is more motivated. She spends more time with her siblings.

She says she has distanced herself from the old crowd she used to hang out with, but it has been hard because Moore County is a small community.

She says she is using her paychecks from work to pay for her car and help out her family.

It is a big change from life when she was on drugs.

“If I was using and I had a paycheck, my family wouldn’t see a dime of it,” she says. “I would spend it all on myself and on my pills.”

Now she wants to be a substance abuse counselor.

“I’ve been through it,” she says. “I know how it is, so I think it will be a lot easier to relate.”

Contact Tom Embrey at tembrey@thepilot.com.