500 Pills, 2000 Days

It was just an ordinary day at the Center View Apartment Complex in Turner, Louisiana, a suburban neighborhood, fifteen minutes from New Orleans. I had been the property manager at the community for six years. It was like any ordinary apartment complex; some of the residents are great, and others you quietly hoped would move out sooner rather than later.

It was late afternoon, close to five o’clock, the time I was supposed to get off, although it was usually closer to six by the time I left to go home. It was easier to get my paperwork done after the office closed and all the other employees left for the day.

One of the elderly residents who came to my office quite frequently just to talk, walked in at four-forty-five and sat down at my desk. We started a conversation while I continued to do my paperwork. While we were chatting, I got up from my desk to get a binder from on top of the file cabinet behind my desk, when a small package fell to the floor. I picked it up and saw that it was addressed to a man with one of the apartments numbers in the building.

“Oh shit, I forgot about this,” I said aloud, more to myself than to Janice, the elderly resident.

“What is it?” she asked.

“Oh, it’s just a package that a resident brought to me about three weeks ago that was put in her mailbox, and it’s not hers. It’s her address, but she doesn’t recognize the name on the box.”

“What are you doing with it?” Janice asked.

She was so freaking nosy!

“I looked up the name to see if the person had ever lived in the apartment complex, but nothing came up in the resident files. I tried googling the name, but nothing relevant showed up around Turner or New Orleans either. I was waiting to see if anyone would call to claim it, then I forgot about it.”

“So, what are you going to do about it now?” Janice asked.

“I’m going to open it up to see if there is anything important in it that might direct me to the owner. If not, I hope it’s drugs.”

It had been somewhat of a standing joke between Janice and me. Whenever I couldn’t identify the owner of a misdirected package, I usually opened it. I knew it was against the law, but don’t tell me that people don’t do this all the time when they get someone else’s package by mistake. Anyway, before opening it, I always said, “I hope it’s drugs.” She knew the stress I had in my life, and I would always say that I wish I had some drugs. Janice would always make a disapproving face when I said that, then laugh it off.

Over the past year, I had been through a lot of stress, financially, emotionally, and physically. In property management, your job was only secure if you could keep the occupancy high, regardless of the economy, hurricanes, or anything else affecting the rental market. And it had been a rough year in the rental and housing market. Emotionally, I had been dealing with an adult son having his own personal problems that always seemed to fall back on me.

Physically, I had recently undergone surgery on my knee, and at that time I was given some hydrocodone for the pain. I took the small amount I was prescribed after the surgery, but when the pain continued, my doctor gave me another twelve pills, though he made it clear he wouldn’t prescribe any more after that. I had never had any addiction problems, but while taking the pills, I realized they helped with my anxiety even more than with the pain I was experiencing. They had a way of calming me down, helping me sleep, and, as an added benefit, they improved my creativity. I had recently taken up creative writing as a hobby, and when I popped one of those pills, the words just flowed across the page.

Anyway, I would always say that I hoped a package contained drugs before opening it. This time I was looking over the package before opening it and I noticed that it was shipped from somewhere outside of the country. There was a custom form attached and the writing along the bottom of the package was in another language. I assumed it was Chinese.

“This must be drugs,” I told Janice. “It’s from overseas.” As if they didn’t ship drugs in the US. I opened the package and looked inside, but I couldn’t tell what it was. I turned the box upside down and shook it until the contents fell out. Most of it landed on my desk but a couple of packets slipped off and landed in my lap. I picked up one of the unidentifiable packets that had fallen in my lap and realized it was several sheets of pills.

“It’s freaking drugs!!!” Once again, I said more to myself than to Janice.

“What do you mean?” Janice asked.

What fell out of the box was several packets of pills: ten pills per sheet, with fifty sheets bundled together in groups of ten using rubber bands. The pills were labeled as Tapentadol 200 mg.—not something I had ever heard of, so I googled it. It was an opioid in the same family as hydrocodone and oxycodone. I started counting them like cards in a deck. A total of 500 pills. What the hell!!!

“What are they? Huh? What kind of drugs?” Janice said to me, getting very excited. I was hoping her blood pressure wouldn’t rise, she was eighty-five years old. She grabbed one of the packets and started looking it over. I explained to her what they were. Not a smart move.

“You’re not going to keep these, are you? They could be dangerous or illegal. What are you going to do with them?”

“I don’t know. Right now, I’m squeezing them back into the box until I decide what to do.” I took all the pills and tried to fit them back in the box, but they didn’t fit in the way they came out, so I just put them in haphazardly. I put the box under my desk with my handbag and went about finishing up my paperwork while trying to distract Janice from what had just happened.

Thirty minutes later, Janice finally left after wishing me a nice weekend, and I was able to lock up and close the office. I pulled down the shades and put up the Office Hours sign before grabbing the box and my handbag and heading out to my car. As I was driving home, I started feeling anxious. There was a camera in my office which now had footage of me and Janice handling the drugs that spilled out of a package I illegally opened onto my desk. This wasn’t good. I had no idea what I was going to do about the drugs, but I absolutely did not want Janice to be involved. She was a blabbermouth. She couldn’t keep a secret if the world’s survival depended on it. I decided to give her a call. We had become kind of close over the six years and we shared each other’s personal cell phone numbers.

“Hey, Janice. I called to let you know what I did with the package. I came home and wiped it clean of any fingerprints, and I taped it back up with the same packing tape they had on it, and I put ‘Return to Sender’ on it and stuck it in the mailbox receptacle at the post office close to my house.”

“I think that was a good idea, Sara. You don’t know if somebody is looking for those drugs and they might come looking for you. I’m glad you did that. You have a good weekend,” she said, once again.

“You too, Janice. I’m home, so let me get inside,” I told her. Now she had me worried. Could somebody really be looking for those drugs, waiting for me to take the box home from the office? I started looking around my neighborhood as I was opening the front door of my little shotgun house. It was crazy to think that someone would be lurking around my office for three weeks just waiting for me to walk out with a small brown box.

Once I was inside, I got out of my work clothes and into my shorts and a T-shirt, then took the box into the kitchen so I could do some more investigating. I put it on my large kitchen table, used for everything but eating a meal, and pulled out the contents again.

I remembered reading and hearing stories on the news about fentanyl overdoses and deaths. They said that even a small amount ingested could be enough to kill some people. I didn’t know what I was dealing with, so before going any further with the box or the drugs, I put on some latex gloves. I didn’t want to have anything poisonous on my hands or my fingerprints on anything illegal. But seriously, why would anyone have been getting such a large quantity of legal drugs in packets sent to an apartment building? And then again, no one came to my office or called to ask if a package had been delivered by mistake. Often a past resident would call the office looking for a package that had been mailed to their old address and asked if the current resident had turned it in. But no one called about this one.

After close examination of the box, I realized that the writing at the bottom was not Chinese, so I did some more googling and found out that it was an Indian language. While continuing my research, I discovered websites where you could buy these drugs from India. I didn’t know if they were legitimate sites, they looked a little sketchy, but what I did know was that the drugs I had in my possession would be more than equivalent to the hydrocodone I was taking for my knee pain. One of the 200 mg tablets would have to be split four times, and it would still be a dose higher than I normally took of the hydrocodone. I wasn’t a mathematician, but that would be 2,000 days of pain medication. Shit!

Was this a gift or a curse?

Then I started researching the street value of one of those little pills, of which I had 500 in my possession. A couple of Google searches put them at close to ten dollars a pill for my dosage if sold on the street, but I knew people who would pay more than that for a little euphoria. Then I started looking at it in another way: if you sold those pills for ten dollars each on the street, you could make five thousand dollars. Sell them for twenty, and you could make ten thousand. Was that the intention of the recipient? To sell the drugs on the street?

My thoughts were going crazy. I put the pills back in the box and started making my dinner. I deleted my Google history, as if I had been researching how to get away with murder. I was only looking up a common, but potent, pain medication. Still, better safe than sorry, in case there were some FBI guys tracking my searches. At that point, I realized that I was getting paranoid, like a drug addict.

An hour later, I got a call from a close friend of mine. We usually talked to each other a couple of times a week. I had to let the secret out. I told her about the package. Her immediate response was:

“You need to get rid of those right now!”

“Why?” I asked. “I could have pain meds anytime I need them.”

“Are you crazy? You don’t know what’s in that shit. It came from out of the country and might not be what it’s labeled as,” she screamed at me through the phone.

Why did I let her in on my secret?

“And how do you want me to get rid of them? If I drop them off at the post office with ‘Return to Sender,’ they’re probably going to come right back to the apartment complex,” I said to her.

“Take them to one of those receptacles in Walgreens and CVS where you can drop off unwanted prescriptions.”

“I can’t do that. These are not exactly in prescription bottles, and they have cameras all over those places,” I said to her. Thinking back to one time when I was at Walgreens waiting for a prescription, I was so bored standing in line that I read the instructions on the receptacle, and I clearly remembered it saying - no illegal drugs. These drugs might not be illegal, but I was pretty sure they were obtained illegally.

There was no point in telling my yelling friend; she probably wouldn’t have listened anyway.

“How they gonna know it’s you,” she said.

Good point, I thought, but I wasn’t looking forward to 2,000 days in JAIL.

“Don’t worry about it, I’ll take care of it. I’ll take them to Walgreens. Let me go, my son is calling,” I said to her, just to get her off the phone. No way was I taking those drugs to Walgreens.

“You better,” she said before hanging up.

I decided to put the drugs away in a safe place for the night and worry about what I wanted to do with them tomorrow. What was the big rush? They had been sitting in my office for three weeks, and nobody had noticed them.

I sat on the problem for about three days. I really wanted to keep the pills, for my pain and anxiety. I didn’t drink, I didn’t smoke, and I wasn’t a drug addict. But having something in my possession that I could take when I was hurting or overwhelmed, without a doctor dismissing me or questioning, “What do you need that for?” felt empowering. It gave me a sense of control over my own body and mind. That was one of the arguments for keeping them.

On the other hand, I didn’t really know where the pills had come from or if they were actually what they were labeled as. If I were ever found with those drugs in my rental house, or on my person, could I be arrested, since they weren’t in a prescription bottle with the name of the drug and the issuing doctor on the label? If I was careless and left them somewhere where they could be found by someone else, I could be charged with possession with intent to distribute. And if I kept them around, what if, after a really bad day, I just decided to try one without testing for fentanyl? I couldn’t afford to die. I had two beautiful children.

I could think of one good reason to keep them, and 500 reasons not to. So then, how could I safely dispose of them without anyone knowing I’d ever been involved?

This was what I decided to do. I took a few packs at a time, crushed the pills with a hammer, and mixed them in with the used cat litter I disposed of three times a week. I didn’t think anyone would ever dig through a plastic bag with cat shit in it. It would take a while to dispose of them that way, two weeks, to be exact, but I didn’t want anyone else to get their hands on them. Same thing with the post office, CVS, and Walgreens, where they could have ended up anywhere.

It might have sounded foolish to some people, but they were in my possession, and that was how I wanted to handle it. And with the help of my cat, Harvey, that was exactly what I did.

Two weeks later, Janice brought a newspaper article to the office, that she wanted me to see. It was a statement from the local police department, warning the public about the illegal sale and use of Tapentadol. They stated that it was a powerful opioid being sold as a recreational drug often disguised as a “clean high”. They warned it was extremely addictive and could cause overdose and even death. After reading that, I felt better about disposing of them the way I did. I didn’t want to be involved with the police, and I didn’t want the drugs to end up in the wrong hands if I didn’t dispose of them properly.

I decided I wouldn’t be opening any more packages that didn’t belong to me. I didn’t want to put any more responsibility on myself; I already had enough!