leg injury, he also uses it to stave off boredom and stimulate his work as a diagnostic detective. Any similarity to the cocaine-injecting Sherlock Holmes is surely intentional. But only the very earliest Holmes stories actually depict drug abuse: Arthur Conan Doyle, worried that he might encourage addiction, quickly made his hero abandon the vice. Not so the makers of House, who have sustained the central character’s dependence on Vicodin despite criticism from some medical professionals (and, reportedly, the Drug Enforcement Agency).
‘Since the first episode I have been concerned with the show’s message and have attempted several times to educate the writers and producers regarding the danger of Vicodin abuse,’ wrote one physician, coincidentally named Dr John House, who specialises in hearing loss, a devastating side effect of Vicodin.15 He lobbied long and hard for this symptom to be recognised in House and eventually it was, albeit in a throwaway line. (As I write, the series is coming to an end, and so far one symptom that hasn’t been mentioned, so far as I can tell, is the awful constipation it causes: a truly realistic scenario would force the good doctor to spend most of the season straining on the lavatory.) The fictional House does succeed in giving up Vicodin after suffering rather implausible hallucinations caused by the drug and completing a period of rehab, but after a couple of seasons he is shown relapsing.
Vicodin was already a fashionable recreational drug when the show first aired in 2004. It was passed around like after-dinner mints at Manhattan dinner parties. In 2001, USA Today described Vicodin as ‘the new celebrity drug of choice’. Matthew Perry, one of the stars of Friends, had already gone into rehab for his addiction to it – twice. Eminem had a Vicodin tattoo on his arm. David Spade joked about it at the Golden Globes. ‘Who isn’t doing them?’ asked Courtney Love. ‘Everyone who makes it starts popping them.’16 Celebrities favoured it for the same reason other users did: it was (and is) relatively easy to persuade doctors to prescribe it. In the US, Vicodin falls into the Schedule III category, less tightly controlled than stronger opiate painkillers such as Oxycontin, classified as Schedule II. You can phone in a prescription for Vicodin to a pharmacy; for Oxycontin, you have to hand over a physical script.
So by the time the first House screenplays were being written in 2003, Vicodin was already as famous for its recreational buzz as for its painkilling properties. When the show became a hit, Associated Press writer Frazier Moore suggested that its success was thanks to the way it ‘fetishises pain’. In other words, millions of Americans on painkillers could identify with Dr House’s suffering.17 If true, that’s only part of the story. The scripts often refer to Greg House’s pain, caused by the removal of leg muscles after a thigh aneurysm. But much of the sharpest humour centres around House’s schoolboy naughtiness in trying to score more pills than he has been prescribed. That isn’t the fetishisation of pain: it’s the fetishisation of Vicodin. An unofficial range of House T-shirts, still on sale in 2011, includes one that reads: ‘Wake up and smell the Vicodin’. The same logo, accompanied by a photo of Hugh Laurie looking spaced out, is also available as desktop wallpaper for your computer.
Meanwhile, the embedding of the drug in other parts of popular culture continues apace.
‘The Vicodin Song’, by singer-songwriter Terra Naomi, has been watched on YouTube more than half a million times. It’s an appropriately sleepy ballad which begins: And I’ve got Vicodin, do you wanna come over?
The most popular comment on the thread underneath the YouTube video reads: ‘When I listen to this I think of Dr House :)) This song is really cool.’18 Many of the 2,000-plus comments, however, aren’t about the song or the show. They’re about how much Vicodin you can take recreationally without hurting your liver. It’s a vigorous debate:
FreeWhoopin1390: Well vicodin (aka hydrocodone) gives you a good calm high. It’s a super chill high to be honest. Now some people might try and tell you that 20–25 mg gets you high, let me start by saying those people are idiots. 20–25 mg will give you a relaxed small buzz for the first time. If you want a really good calm high that lasts for a while take 35–40 mg. I say 40 for the first time but that’s just me. Word of caution tho, do not exceed 4000 mg of tylenol [paracetamol] which is in vicodin, in 24 hours.
Thebluefus: If you get 40 mg of hydrocodone by taking vicodin you have reached the max for tylenol. You don’t need that much to get high, especially as a first time. Just two vicodin will get you the feeling. Don’t be stupid.
FreeWhoopin1390: Are you fucking stupid? The max for tylenol is 4000 mg a day. I take 50 mg of hydrocodone at once (they are 10/500). Which means they have 10 mg hydrocodone and 500 mg tylenol. Which means I am taking 2500 mg of tylenol. Which is nowhere near the max daily dosage. But thank you for sharing what you don’t know.
There are also catfights about the respective virtues of Vicodin and Oxycontin and a discussion of the regional variations in street prices. From time to time someone interrupts to say that they take Vicodin for real pain and that these junkies should be ashamed of themselves. But there are also commenters who were legitimately prescribed the drug who are now junkies themselves. They may resent being a slave to Vicodin or they may enjoy the high; perhaps a bit of both. What should we make of a comment like this?
1awareness: Bragging about pills is lame. I’m using them to make fibromyalgia feel less intense. I also have seizures which cause a lot of pain. I enjoy Vicodin.
These are commenters who describe themselves as Vicodin ‘users/abusers’, a term that neatly captures the ambiguity of prescription drug abuse. All mood-altering drugs, from Scotch whisky to crack cocaine, can be abused: you can harm yourself by taking too much of them. But the vast majority are supposed to intoxicate, even when consumed in ‘safe’ quantities. The Vicodin abuser, on the other hand, is hooked on a drug that the manufacturers insist isn’t designed to alter moods. To further complicate matters, if the abuser is in real pain, it can be hard to tell whether he or she is merely over-medicating or enjoying an extra recreational buzz on top of the pain relief – Dr Gregory House likes to keep his colleagues guessing on this point. But that sort of confusion doesn’t make Vicodin dependence any less difficult to manage; it just means that, like so many 21st-century addictions, it is difficult to categorise and therefore difficult to treat.
As if these problems weren’t bad enough, it was revealed at the beginning of 2012 that several drug companies were working on hydrocodone pills that were potentially ten times as strong as Vicodin. The new pills would be ‘safer’ than Vicodin, according to Roger Hawley, chief executive of Zogenix, because they wouldn’t contain the paracetamol that harms the liver. Maybe so; but their time-release formula would also allow abusers to crunch them up for one hell of a hit. Zohydro, as Zogenix plans to call the drug, is scheduled for release in 2013.
This is just a guess, but it wouldn’t surprise me if, all over America, clued-up Vicodin users are already telling their doctors that their pain is getting worse and maybe they could use something a little stronger …
The addictive qualities of cupcakes, iPhones and Vicodin aren’t immediately obvious. Someone encountering a cupcake for the first time since childhood doesn’t think: uh-oh, I’d better be careful not to develop a sugar addition that triggers an eating disorder and end up washing the sick out of my hair. Likewise, people buying their first smartphone don’t worry about developing an obsessive-compulsive relationship with a computer game, and until recently the recreational use of painkillers was almost unheard of. In other words, as unqualified consumers we’re increasingly tempted
