Rob’s Story: It Started with Prescriptions (Episode 1 Part 1)

Rob’s Story: It Started with Prescriptions (Episode 1 Part 1)

How do individuals turn their lives around after addiction? This first part of Rob’s story gives a stark, honest look at how something prescribed for pain relief can spiral into years of heroin and fentanyl use. Told in a raw, conversational style, the episode follows Rob as he remembers his very first encounter with fentanyl: a patch originally prescribed to his friend’s terminally ill grandmother.

Thinking it would work like other painkillers, he eats the gel, gets frustrated when nothing happens, then finishes the whole patch. Hours later he’s “super loaded”, still high the next morning, and so sedated he passes out in his truck for 12 hours in the college car park. His line, “my nose was to the steering wheel and I could barely stay awake,” captures just how overpowering the drug felt.

Aimed at people curious about how opioid use can begin, loved ones trying to understand, and those in recovery themselves, the episode breaks down fentanyl in simple terms. Rob explains how it’s measured in micrograms, used mainly for terminal illness, and later started showing up as a cutting agent in heroin and in raw powder form. The conversation also gets into stigma, even among drug users.

Rob talks about hiding his heroin use from friends who only smoked weed and drank, and how they pushed him away once they knew he carried “dope and needles”. He admits to lying and stealing from his family, saying he lied so much he could “visualise my own lies and believe they happened”.

A key message lands at the end: many people’s first contact with opiates is through ordinary prescriptions found in medicine cabinets or given after dental work or broken bones. As Rob bluntly agrees, “It starts with prescriptions? Absolutely.” If you’ve ever wondered how something that begins in a doctor’s office can end in full-blown addiction, this story might prompt some important questions.