One Man’s Journey Through Opioid Addiction

IT’S THE HERO’S JOURNEY! –

Oct. 14, 2022 – “I overdosed on drugs. I took heroin laced with fentanyl,” the 38-year-old Idaho Falls man says. “I was dead.”

Exactly how long he was dead is unclear. To this day, Mahan has no idea. The next thing he remembers is lying in a hospital bed in Idaho Falls.

“I woke up, and I had a tube in my throat, and I had burns on my chest from the defibrillation paddles,” Mahan says.

He thinks they used Narcan as well, which is a medication used to treat opioid overdoses.

Fentanyl is 100 times more powerful than morphine and about 50 times more potent than heroin, according to Bonneville County Sheriff Sam Hulse. A lethal dose of fentanyl is about the size of 5-10 grains of salt, which makes it easy to overdose.

On that day, Mahan thought he was getting high on heroin. He had no idea fentanyl was one of the ingredients.

At that time, Mahan had been a drug addict for more than 20 years. He had part of his frontal lobe removed in 2017 after being diagnosed with brain cancer. It motivated him to cut back on his usage for a while, but it wasn’t long before he was back on the streets selling and using drugs.

“I got back on the needle and went back to using (drugs) intravenously. Really threw my whole life off the rails,” Mahan says.

And he had no intention of ever stopping.

Mahan’s introduction to opiates happened as an 11-year-old kid. His parents owned a taco stand on 1st Street at the time, and he was injured in a grease fire that burned 85% of his body.

During his hospital stay, doctors gave him morphine with trace amounts of fentanyl to kill the pain.

Mahan still remembers how it made him feel. He loved it and wanted more of it. Working as a drug dealer gave him access to all the drugs he wanted.

Eventually, he was arrested and spent some time in prison. He’d recently completed a rider program when he overdosed in Sept. 2020.

His brush with death was finally enough to get him to stop. He realized for the first time in his life that he had value and that he was worth saving.

“It was the last time I used heroin,” Mahan says.