‘I was a top doctor …and an opioid addict'

As the UK government announces new guidelines to deal with a growing opioid crisis, a US anaesthetist speaks candidly about her own descent into opioid addiction, which in America kills 130,000 people every day

Alison ran around her palatial six-bedroom house in Georgia, US, on a crisp January night in 2016, preparing to depart the next day for a family ski trip in Colorado. She washed dishes, put on several loads of laundry and crossed items offher packing list. Whenever she found a moment alone − every 45 minutes or so − she retrieved the syringe containing sufentanil she’d tucked inside one of her Ugg boots, fashioned a makeshift tourniquet out of her hooded sweatshirt, found a usable vein, and plunged the needle into her arm, delivering one tenth of a millilitre of the most powerful opioid available for use in the human body.

By the end of the night, she had polished offtwo millilitres, an amount that could kill an average-size adult if given in a single dose, but Alison wasn’t intimidated. As an anaesthesiologist, she’d spent her entire professional life delivering such substances to patients during surgery.

‘For me, it felt like when you have a really good glass of wine and you’re like, “Aah”,’ says Alison, now 46. ‘During that time, that [feeling] was all I looked forward to. It was really the only thing that was good in a [normal] day for me.’ Before she started abusing opioids six months earlier, Alison had never used a drug recreationally − other than a puffof marijuana during high school. She enjoyed a glass of red wine with dinner once or twice a month, but hadn’t ever thought of using the substances she injected into patients all day, every day. ‘I’d been in anaesthesia for 18 years, and it never even tempted me,’ she says.