poledriver
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How a group of teen wrestlers built an Oxycodone empire
IN JUNE 2009, Lance Barabas threw the sort of party that turns college students into local legends.
Cocaine was served on silver trays. Opiate pills were passed around in goblets.
The bacchanal was “filled with college kids smoking weed, drinking out of Jagermeister kegerators, and dancing to Top 40 music,” writes Barabas’s friend, Douglas Dodd in Generation Oxy: From High School Wrestlers to Pain Pill Kingpins, co-written by Matthew B. Cox.
And yet drugs and booze weren’t enough for Barabas, a business-management student making a small fortune working for fellow student Dodd, who had built a massive oxycodone-dealing business in just three years, the New York Post reports.
Flush with drug money, Barabas needed to go all-out.
Dodd, who was at the party, describes the scene in detail: “Lance spread out one hundred grand on his kingsize bed and let a dozen drunken sorority girls snap photos of each other rolling around in cash before posting them on Facebook. Co-eds were getting f—-d up on pills, striking ‘Charlie’s Angels’ poses in nothing but lingerie and holding Lance’s assault rifles and handguns.”
But this would mark the end rather than the beginning of the pals’ spree. That same night, Justin Knox, a “standout wrestler at Cumberland University” who sold pills for Dodd in Tennessee, was arrested and thrown behind bars — the first member of their drug ring to get caught.
He would not be the last.
‘Generation Oxy” is Dodd’s tale of how he and his friends started selling pills for extra money in high school in 2006 and ended up overseeing a nationwide, multimillion-dollar drug ring that was making $40,000 ($A52,000) a month at its height.
Dodd, born in 1988 in New Port Richey, Florida, writes that he grew up in a trailer park with a “functioning alcoholic” mum and a philandering dad.
He got stoned for the first time at age 10 and arrested, for marijuana possession, at age 13.
Dodd and his friends were athletic, on the wrestling team and prolific weed smokers.
He met Barabas and his brother Landon, and their friend Richard Sullivan, at wrestling practice on his first day at Hudson High School in Hudson, Florida, in 2003, describing them as “a bunch of blond-haired, blue-eyed, wisecracking rich kids surrounded by a pool of the underprivileged.”
The four became inseparable, spending all their time wrestling, smoking pot and partying on the weekends.
Barabas was the control freak of the group, with Dodd writing that his Adderall was “the only thing keeping him somewhat under control.” His brother, Landon was “a ‘pretty boy’ with Captain America good looks” who “thrived on attention and was so vain he couldn’t pass a reflective surface without looking at himself.” Sullivan was an aspiring porn star whose goal was to “sleep with as many women as possible.”
Earning straight A’s in school, Dodd spent his weekends at parties at a friend’s double-wide trailer with about a hundred other students, drinking vodka and grain-alcohol punch and holding impromptu wrestling matches in the trailer after moving the furniture outside.
“It was more like a scene from ‘Fight Club’ than your typical high-school party,” Dodd writes. “There were always a few real brawls and lots of drinking.”
In February 2006, when Dodd was 17, he was arrested a second time for marijuana possession after a state trooper caught him smoking a joint in his car.
His mother kicked him out of her house, and he moved in with his grandmother, spending his time hanging out with his cousin Julian, who lived down the street.
Subject to weekly drug tests, Dodd writes that he and Julian “spent most of our time watching movies and getting wasted on oxycodone pain pills, a semisynthetic opioid used for managing severe acute or chronic pain.”
While marijuana shows up in drug tests for months, oxy leaves your system in just a few days.
Dodd was immediately taken with the narcotic.
“The warm soothing sensation of the oxycodone rushing through my veins, relaxing and loosening every muscle fibre within my body, was overwhelmingly euphoric,” he writes.
Cont -
http://www.news.com.au/lifestyle/re...e/news-story/dd8a48469aad9605e064378902c65db8
IN JUNE 2009, Lance Barabas threw the sort of party that turns college students into local legends.
Cocaine was served on silver trays. Opiate pills were passed around in goblets.
The bacchanal was “filled with college kids smoking weed, drinking out of Jagermeister kegerators, and dancing to Top 40 music,” writes Barabas’s friend, Douglas Dodd in Generation Oxy: From High School Wrestlers to Pain Pill Kingpins, co-written by Matthew B. Cox.
And yet drugs and booze weren’t enough for Barabas, a business-management student making a small fortune working for fellow student Dodd, who had built a massive oxycodone-dealing business in just three years, the New York Post reports.
Flush with drug money, Barabas needed to go all-out.
Dodd, who was at the party, describes the scene in detail: “Lance spread out one hundred grand on his kingsize bed and let a dozen drunken sorority girls snap photos of each other rolling around in cash before posting them on Facebook. Co-eds were getting f—-d up on pills, striking ‘Charlie’s Angels’ poses in nothing but lingerie and holding Lance’s assault rifles and handguns.”
But this would mark the end rather than the beginning of the pals’ spree. That same night, Justin Knox, a “standout wrestler at Cumberland University” who sold pills for Dodd in Tennessee, was arrested and thrown behind bars — the first member of their drug ring to get caught.
He would not be the last.
‘Generation Oxy” is Dodd’s tale of how he and his friends started selling pills for extra money in high school in 2006 and ended up overseeing a nationwide, multimillion-dollar drug ring that was making $40,000 ($A52,000) a month at its height.
Dodd, born in 1988 in New Port Richey, Florida, writes that he grew up in a trailer park with a “functioning alcoholic” mum and a philandering dad.
He got stoned for the first time at age 10 and arrested, for marijuana possession, at age 13.
Dodd and his friends were athletic, on the wrestling team and prolific weed smokers.
He met Barabas and his brother Landon, and their friend Richard Sullivan, at wrestling practice on his first day at Hudson High School in Hudson, Florida, in 2003, describing them as “a bunch of blond-haired, blue-eyed, wisecracking rich kids surrounded by a pool of the underprivileged.”
The four became inseparable, spending all their time wrestling, smoking pot and partying on the weekends.
Barabas was the control freak of the group, with Dodd writing that his Adderall was “the only thing keeping him somewhat under control.” His brother, Landon was “a ‘pretty boy’ with Captain America good looks” who “thrived on attention and was so vain he couldn’t pass a reflective surface without looking at himself.” Sullivan was an aspiring porn star whose goal was to “sleep with as many women as possible.”
Earning straight A’s in school, Dodd spent his weekends at parties at a friend’s double-wide trailer with about a hundred other students, drinking vodka and grain-alcohol punch and holding impromptu wrestling matches in the trailer after moving the furniture outside.
“It was more like a scene from ‘Fight Club’ than your typical high-school party,” Dodd writes. “There were always a few real brawls and lots of drinking.”
In February 2006, when Dodd was 17, he was arrested a second time for marijuana possession after a state trooper caught him smoking a joint in his car.
His mother kicked him out of her house, and he moved in with his grandmother, spending his time hanging out with his cousin Julian, who lived down the street.
Subject to weekly drug tests, Dodd writes that he and Julian “spent most of our time watching movies and getting wasted on oxycodone pain pills, a semisynthetic opioid used for managing severe acute or chronic pain.”
While marijuana shows up in drug tests for months, oxy leaves your system in just a few days.
Dodd was immediately taken with the narcotic.
“The warm soothing sensation of the oxycodone rushing through my veins, relaxing and loosening every muscle fibre within my body, was overwhelmingly euphoric,” he writes.
Cont -
http://www.news.com.au/lifestyle/re...e/news-story/dd8a48469aad9605e064378902c65db8
