95–20: Florida’s Pill Mill Generation

Being back here, it never takes long for reminders to find me—or for me to spot them. The life I escaped still lingers in reflections and faces. I carry some ugly scars, bad tattoos, and the attention span of a ten-year-old, but I carry them with gratitude.

An old family friend called out from in front of the gas station, standing with a new group of friends. He recognized me—the top half of my face through the truck window, maybe my voice too. I wouldn’t be hard to recognize. Couldn’t say the same for him. His smile was half there, his frame fifty pounds lighter, stab wounds fading into pale lines, ankles swollen, a backpack holding most of what he owned.

He told me about his dream—to save enough money to fix up his bicycle and race it. A small flicker of hope. That’s all anyone needs. It hadn’t taken everything. The flame was still there, dim but alive. I believed him. I knew then that light lived in everyone still breathing, whether the world saw it or not.

That story’s too common for the ones who survived Florida’s pill mill years—and not just here, everywhere. Back then it started as a party, usually at someone’s family house. Everyone laughing, trying new things, chasing a good time while the web built itself quietly, threading through all of us.

Ten years later, when the party was over, we saw what was left. Like after a hurricane, when you drive around looking at what’s broken and what might be rebuilt. Only this storm wasn’t natural. It was rooted deep—fed by greed, by pain clinics the government allowed to bloom on every corner, only to rip away the prescriptions once addiction had wrapped itself around every life it touched. Then came the jail cells. The three-strike rule. The private prisons. And the silence.

He didn’t look at me in shame, but in sorrow. He knew he was one of the lucky ones. My sister wasn’t. I could listen to anyone talk about her for hours, no matter what the memory. She existed. People remembered—sometimes better than me.

And there it was: me, him, and the memory of her. We were the three outcomes of it all. She was the 33%. Not that I came out unscathed. I suffer in silence. I fight my own addictions. But I know I’m not alone.