LEXINGTON, Ky. -- Jessica Blackburn didn’t know she was addicted to opioids until her body’s first withdrawal.
It was 2004, and she was 18. For the last year, she’d swallowed oxycontin recreationally at high school parties in Betsy Lane, her Eastern Kentucky hometown. The first time her body responded to a deficit of pills, Blackburn thought she’d caught a bad case of the flu. It was her high school boyfriend who explained that her body had become dependent.
“It all just kind of clicked,” Blackburn, 36, said recently by phone.
