'If It Goes In Your Mouth, Ask': Students, Parents Warned Of Dangers Of Pain Medication

(Ocean County Prosecutor Joseph Coronato poses with Frankie Edgar, Ray Lucas, Keith Elias, Erin Cowley, Tony Meola and Todd Frazier show how they roll after the Playing It Clean forum at Pine Belt Arena in Toms River. Also pictured in the photo gallery: Dr. T. Raj Juneja, chair of the Ocean County Opiate Task Force, talking about the effects opiates have on the brain. Credits: Karen Wall)

Ray Lucas was taking 80 pills a day when the pain stopped.

“I was taking pills that would kill 10 of you all sitting here right now,” the former Jets quarterback said, addressing parents and students gathered for a forum on drugs and sports. But the pills weren’t the reason the pain stopped.

“For the first time in two years, I had a moment of clarity. I had a plan,” he said. “I was going to kill myself.”

The path that led him to that moment, he said, started with a back injury suffered during a weightroom session and was fueled by the very nature of who he was: a competitive athlete.

Lucas was the main speaker Thursday night, but all of the athletes present had a similar message for the audience of 1,300 who had gathered for Playing It Clean, a forum organized by the Ocean County Prosecutor’s Office and hosted by the Toms River Regional School District at Pine Belt Arena. Kevin Williams of Townsquare Media served as the emcee.

School districts from throughout Ocean County were represented in the audience, including two busloads of student-athletes from Point Pleasant Boro, who were joined by staff and district superintendent Vincent Smith.

David Healy, superintendent of the Toms River district, said he felt the district had a duty to host the event.

“Our job as educators is to plant the seeds for good decisions,” Healy said. “You never know when those seeds are going to flourish, but they do.”

Ocean County Prosecutor Joseph Coronato said he felt the event was important because prevention -- keeping people from using drugs in the first place -- is a critical piece in the battle against the heroin problem in the county.

“Sure, we can arrest people, and we do,” he said. “But we want to stop it before it starts.”

Local sports heros Todd Frazier, Frankie Edgar and Tony Meola were joined by Erin Cowley, a local addiction counselor who played basketball at Temple in the mid-1980s and had earned a spot on the U.S. women’s Olympic team before an injury that temporarily paralyzed her ended her basketball career.

She, too, was given prescription painkillers, and nearly lost her life to the addiction, she said. And while she has not used any drugs or alcohol in nearly 24 years, “the temptation to use is as much today as it was when I was in active addiction.”

“Most people don’t plan on getting addicted,” said Dr. Raj Juneja, chair of the Ocean County Opiate Task Force and a local physician. But opiates -- the primary choice for pain management -- have a strong physical component to them.

“Your brain does change,” when you become addicted to opiates, Juneja said. Any time they are prescribed they should be handled with extreme care, he said, urging parents and athletes to consider other methods of pain management instead of automatically accepting the recommendation for opiates.

“If it goes in your mouth, ask questions about it,” he said.

“If I gave you something that physically changes your looks, you would run away from it,” said Keith Elias, the former Lacey High School and Giants football player, who was moderating the event, as he summarized what Juneja was saying. “This (opiates) changes your brain. Think about that.”

Elias also moderated the panel discussion with Frazier, Edgar, Meola and Cowley. And all of them had a similar message: avoid drugs at all costs.

“Every story about drugs never ends good,” said Edgar, who says the pressures to use drugs -- be it painkillers, performance enhancers or anything else -- are strong in his sport, mixed martial arts.

“You’re only as good as your last performance,” he said of MMA. There are no contracts, he said, no guarantees, so if you lose, your career can be over. As someone who was told he was “too small” for the sport, there’s pressures to ”get bigger,” through the use of performance-enhancing drugs. The 2000 Toms River East graduate said he refuses to give in to that pressure.

“I have three kids I want to be a role model for. I want to be a role model for my town,” Edgar said, drawing a round of applause from the crowd.

Frazier, who found himself in the spotlight at 12 years old as one of the star players on the Toms River East American Little League team that captured the 1998 World Series title, said the pressure to perform is intense in Major League Baseball, and drugs are readily available.

“I know guys who take adderal in the offseason just to be able to function normally at home,” he said. ”You have to trust yourself and believe in yourself” to avoid the trap of using. For him, it comes down to one thing: the legacy he will leave behind.

“I don’t want to be questioned ever in my life about my abilities,” Frazier said.

Meola echoed that sentiment.

“I didn’t want to be the guy with the asterisk at the bottom of the page,” he said. The former U.S. men’s national team goalkeeper who went to three World Cups said a severe Achilles’ injury resulted in him taking Toradol, a strong anti-inflammatory that can cause significant damage to the stomach, kidneys and more if taken for too long.

It was given to him by a trainer to manage the pain of the Achilles injury. But after questioning the trainer on it, he quit taking it.

“I’m an all-or-nothing guy,” he said. “At 20, I stopped drinking.” He quit taking the Toradol and never looked back.

“You guys, your high school career is your professional career right now,” Meola said. “You have to have the backbone to say no.”

Lucas said his descent into addiction began with a weightroom injury that resulted in two herniated discs in his back three years into his career. He had a choice then, to have career-ending surgery, or to go through rehab and continue to play, with the knowledge that one hit could leave him paralyzed.

“Surrender was not in my vocabulary,” he said.

He kept playing, for five more years, until a sneeze during practice rendered him paralyzed from the waist down.

Being forced to quit football led to depression, and when he finally had the surgery on his back, the doctors prescribed Roxycodone, an instant-release form of oxycodone.

After a few days, he stopped taking them, with side effects so severe his wife wanted to call an ambulance. She called Lucas’ father -- the only person he would listen to -- instead to get him to the hospital for treatment.

“That was my first experience with withdrawal,” he said.

When neck damage from his playing days turned into spasms so severe that he punched a 75-year-old woman in the chest on the train to work one day, he went back in for more surgery -- this time, at his own expense, as he was without insurance.

They gave him painkillers again.

“At my worst I was taking 1,400 (pills a month) of whatever I could get my hands on,” he said. He and his wife and three daughters lost their home and were forced to move into a small apartment across from a bar.

Drug dealers were coming to the apartment constantly, Lucas said. And the addiction was so strong that the only thing that mattered was getting the pills. Until the day he decided to kill himself.

He called an organization for help -- one that had sought his help with fundraisers on many occasions -- and the person who answered didn’t take his statement that he was going to kill himself seriously. Fortunately, one of the doctors did.

After driving back and forth across the George Washington Bridge ”at least eight times” as he made plans to drive his big, red truck off it -- “I figured someone would notice it and call someone,” he said -- he returned home to a message from that doctor, urging him to talk to a therapist before he did anything.

A doctor performed surgery on his neck pro-bono that relieved the spasms and much of the pain, but it still took Lucas time to accept the reality of his addiction.

“My therapist kept telling me I had to say the word surrender,” he said. “I kept saying ’Nope, I’m not gonna do that.’ “

“We’re different. We don’t like to give in to anything,”

It wasn’t until he finally did surrender to that realization that he was an addict that he was able to stop taking the pills and begin to put his life back together.

Lucas, who credits his wife’s strength in keeping their daughters focused and moving forward throughout the ordeal -- “There’s no one tougher than my wife,” he said -- said he doesn’t count the days since he stopped taking pills.

“Today,” he said, “I’m pill free today.”