Cliff Yates still vividly remembers the phone call he got on Aug. 5, 2009, around 6:30 p.m. His ex-wife was on the line, and she was screaming, "Kadie's dead, Kadie's dead!"
Their 22-year-old daughter was blue in the face and wasn't breathing, she frantically explained.
"I couldn't move," Yates recalled. "Having been a police officer almost my whole life, I've been subjected to everything a human being can. I've seen people burned, shot, mutilated. Nothing has ever affected my soul the way her passing did."
He later found out that Kadie, a young mother with soulful eyes and a radiant smile, had died from an overdose of combining the prescription drugs Xanax and methadone. She left behind her 2-year-old son, Brodie.
As Yates sat recently in his Ringgold, Ga., living room surrounded by photos of his family, he said he knows his family isn't the only one that's faced this kind of tragedy.
As more pharmaceuticals become available to treat illnesses such as severe pain, depression, seizures and anxiety, prescription drug abuse continues to escalate at alarming rates across the region, officials say.
"The concept that people are dying right and left from heroin and cocaine is put out of proportion because the biggest problem right now is prescription drugs," said Kris Sperry, Georgia's chief medical examiner.
Pharmaceutical abuse has spiked to epidemic levels throughout the nation, according to recent reports from the White House and the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. And it shows no signs of slowing down.
A U.S. government study released July 15 found a 400 percent increase in the number of people treated for prescription pain medication abuse in the past 10 years. The increase "spans every gender, race, ethnicity, education and employment level, and all regions of the country," the report from the Substance Abuse and Mental Health Services Administration stated.
"The abuse of prescription drugs is our nation's fastest-growing drug problem," Gil Kerlikowske, director of the White House Office of National Drug Policy, said in a U.S. Drug Enforcement Administration news release.
Tennessee and Georgia law enforcement officials, emergency room doctors, pharmacists and families see the reality of those numbers.
Just last week, police in Chickamauga, Ga., arrested and charged eight people in connection with a prescription drug operation that police said targeted local teenagers.
Georgia averages two deaths a day from prescription drugs, according to the Georgia Bureau of Investigation. Tennessee ranks sixth in the nation for overall accidental poisoning deaths, which includes prescription drug overdoses, a 2010 report from the CDC found.
The Lookout Mountain Drug Task Force, which covers Catoosa, Walker and Dade counties, has more than tripled its number of prescription pill cases since 2008, said task force Commander Larry Black.
"It's always been a problem," Black said, "but we have really seen a dramatic increase in the last two years."
Parkridge Medical Center in Chattanooga reported 133 emergency room visits diagnosed as prescription drug overdoses already this year.
"We're seeing more prescription drug abuse than we've ever seen in years past," said Dr. Ken Hayman, director of the emergency room at Parkridge.
Other local emergency room physicians said they did not have specific statistics for prescription overdose cases. But Dr. Steve Perlaky, assistant director of the emergency room and chief of staff at Hutcheson Medical Center in Fort Oglethorpe, said his emergency room sees overdose patients at least every other day.
"Sometimes people are desperate and they take whatever they can find," said Perlaky, who said he also sees an increase in overdoses over the holidays.
'OUT OF HAND'
In her 13 years as Catoosa County coroner, Vanita Hullander said pharmaceuticals have become the No. 1 cause of death in the autopsies she conducts.
"Before prescription drugs got so out of hand, I really didn't have so many coroner cases requiring autopsies in a year," she said. "Now we're seeing a steady inflow."
Hullander said prescription drugs such as hydrocodone, methadone and OxyContin now account for the deaths in 85 to 90 percent of the autopsies her office performs. That number has climbed drastically in the last two years, she says.
Most autopsies show that victims have been mixing drugs, she said.
Walker County Coroner Dewayne Wilson said he has never had a year as bad as 2010 in terms of death from drug overdose. Usually he sees four to five accidental overdose cases a year. Only eight months into this year, he's had 12.
In Tennessee, the Bradley County Medical Examiner's Office saw 14 accidental overdoses during all of last year. As of August, there already have been 10 in 2010.
Hamilton County's autopsy statistics do not distinguish between illegal and legal drugs, but the number of deaths from drug overdose leaped from 9.2 per 100,000 to 13.3 between 2007 and 2008, a report from the county's health department shows.
The abuse also has put doctors who treat pain and their patients in a bind.
"It's a horribly dangerous problem," said Dr. Thomas Miller, a physician with Pain Management Specialists in Chattanooga. "Chronic pain is already so incredibly difficult to deal with. In fact, it is all too often undertreated."
Miller said doctors have to make sure patients are not abusing drugs prescribed for pain. And patients fear becoming addicted to pain drugs.
"Physicians are worried about it, and patients with serious pain issues are worried about it," he said.
EASY ACCESS
In the past several years, prescription drug abuse has become "rampant," said Rick Allen, director of the Georgia Drugs and Narcotics Agency.
"It's always been there, but in the last four or five years it has become much, much worse," Allen said.
Experts are still trying to determine what accounts for the recent spike in abuse. Most blame easy accessibility.
"If people know how to outsmart the system, they can just dig into the endless supply of heavy pharmaceuticals being produced these days," Black said.
Several experts also cite the faltering economy as a factor in the increase of sales.
"The problem has really escalated in the last two years," Black said. "A lot of that may have to do with the downturn of the economy. We're seeing many more criminal investigations where people are selling drugs they've legally obtained."
Even in a rough economy, drug sales thrive, Hullander said.
Allen believes the poor economy doesn't just cause people to sell their drugs; it leads them to swallow more.
"It's because it's hard times. People are depressed," Allen said.
Law enforcement officials divide those who misuse pharmaceuticals into two often overlapping categories: abusers and diverters.
Abusers are those who take drugs in a way that is not intended - either overdosing on pills prescribed to them or taking pills they were not prescribed. Diverters are those who obtain drugs, legally or illegally, with the intention of abusing or distributing them.
Drug diverters will doctor shop, frequent different ERs, forge prescriptions and buy off the Internet, which is brimming with sites offering to sell drugs without prescriptions.
Doctors also can be culprits in prescription drug trafficking. In 2008, Dr. Elizabeth Reimers, of Winchester, Tenn., was charged with 130 counts of intentionally dispensing controlled substances to nine patients "outside the scope of professional practice and not for a legitimate purpose," according to Times Free Press archives.
On Aug. 6, Dr. Daniel Fearnow of Shelby County, Tenn., was sentenced to almost 22 years in prison after pleading guilty to issuing illegally more than 25,000 prescriptions to drug dealers, who then sold the drugs to other people.
Black said a common trend is for someone with a prescription to keep half the pills and sell the other half on the street. The person then files a police report claiming half the pills were stolen and obtains a new prescription, he said.
More often than not, however, pills will be stolen right out of patients' medicine cabinets.
FAMILY STRUGGLES
Kadie Yates had struggled with prescription and illicit drug abuse since she was about 15, her father said. He thinks she would experiment with drugs she found in friends' medicine cabinets.
"Our lifestyle wasn't such that she was driven to drugs," explains Yates, a former police officer from Ringgold. "It was just a lot of bad choices on her part."
When she got older, Kadie began to buy and deal. She would obtain methadone at a clinic for methamphetamine addiction, then would sell half the pills.
Yates watched the drugs split his daughter into two people.
"She was Daddy's little girl - outgoing and so friendly. She had a wonderful laugh," described Yates. "But when she was on drugs, she became a totally different person - belligerent and using a lot of abusive language."
She overdosed several times and ended up in a rehab facility in Chattanooga.
She made a full recovery there. But it wasn't long after she got out that she started using drugs again, Yates explained.
"We did everything we could for her," Yates said, looking off to the side and shaking his head. "These kids aren't going to stop until something happens to them or to their friends."
The grief of prescription overdose, Hullander explains, is embittered by the fact that the deaths are so senseless.
The coroner understands what the families she works with go through. She lost her 25-year-old nephew to prescription drug abuse three years ago. He combined methadone, hydrocodone and Xanax and never woke up.
"You can accept all these things that traditionally cost somebody their life," Hullander said. "But when it's something as stupid and senseless as drugs, that is the hardest pain to try to deal with because there's no rhyme or reason."
Hullander said that, for a long time after her nephew died, she wanted justice that she couldn't find.
"I wanted to hold somebody accountable for this life being gone," she said. "But then when you get all down in the wash - even if I tracked down the very doctor who prescribed the pills, nobody made him take them.
"And that's the saddest part, the hardest part for the families. Because they are the ones who lose," she said.
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