Ex-Eagle Rayburn coming back from addiction

"It all stemmed from playing football," Rayburn said of the pain. "My knee, my elbow, some spinal problems - if I was to bend down, I couldn't stand up. Immobility was really the only thing that could alleviate the pain - or medication, obviously. Most of the orthopedic [specialists] I've gone to say I'm going to need a knee replacement."

Rayburn said he increased the dosages as the addiction grew.

"They dull the pain, but they don't turn you into a zombie," he said. "They would give me energy to the point where I could function. If I didn't have them, I couldn't do anything except lay in bed and throw up and roll around and ache."

As his tolerance went up, Rayburn said, "it gets to the point where you don't need them for the pain, you need them just to function. You need them to eat, to sleep, to get up - to do anything at all. You can't even watch TV without taking pills because that's the first thing on your mind."

Rayburn was raised in Chickasha by his mother, who works for the Department of Human Services. His grandmother used to work at the Grady County Courthouse with Ashley Rayburn's mother. During college, Sam was home, got Ashley's number, and they began dating.

Ashley Rayburn said her husband is a guy you would want to be around. "He's an amazing father," she said. But during the months before his most recent stay at a treatment facility, Sam was different, she said.

"Honestly, I didn't know he was doing pills for the last six months," Ashley said. "He had gone into the hospital [in 2008], and we'd ask the doctor for help, and I thought he was doing fine. I thought he was off them for the past six months. The past two months, he was weird. He was just shut off from me and the kids. He would stay in a different room to watch TV. He wasn't really eating."

"You go into a depression," her husband said.

Old-fashioned pharmacy

The Grand Care Pharmacy in Chickasha is an old-fashioned operation, with a purple awning over a glass front, a drive-through window in the back, and three parking spots on the side. You can pick up greeting cards by the door, but there are no aisles of candy or paper products or Snapple, as there are at CVS or Rite Aid. When you walk in, you're at the pharmacist's counter.

When Brian Burdex walked in to fill a prescription for Percocet on March 19, pharmacist Pamela Lee was hesitant. She recognized Burdex from church, she said, and didn't know why he would need such a strong painkiller. She called the doctor's office.

"We make phone calls like that because that's our job, just to kind of dispense safe medication and make sure things aren't being diverted," Lee said in an interview at the pharmacy.

According to court records, Lee was told the prescription was "forged and/or invalid."

On the same day, also at Rayburn's behest, Nathan Ballinger tried to get a prescription filled at a Walgreens pharmacy in town. "The attempt to obtain Lortab was prevented," court records said.

According to those court records, Rayburn had been a patient of the doctor, Joseph Ripperger, a psychiatrist in Norman, Okla., since June 2, 2008. The doctor, who didn't respond to interview requests, told investigators he had never written a prescription for Percocet or Lortab for Rayburn or the younger men, who had never been his patients.

"That was just a spur-of-the-moment thing, it wasn't something I thought about," Rayburn said of taking the prescription sheets. He said he didn't take an entire pad, "just some off the top. . . . When you're addicted, you kind of become insane. You become more impulsive."

Rayburn said he drove Burdex to the pharmacy and waited in the car. All of a sudden, a police car showed up.

"I was like, 'Crap. What's going to happen now?' " Burdex said in an interview.