After 30 years of powerlifting and bodybuilding, John Lehe's once finely-tuned body was worn out and broken down. A 2007 spinal fusion surgery was supposed to repair some of the damage, but instead failed and left him in searing pain.
That's when Lehe started seeing an Anchorage physician specializing in pain management, and when he became addicted to the narcotic painkillers the doctor prescribed.
He remembers the seven years he spent on prescription opioids only in hazy flashes.
"Like you remember a dream," said Lehe, a frank 56-year-old who retains the military bearing and haircut of his first career in the U.S. Marine Corps.
While chasing relief from his pain on ever-increasing doses of narcotic opioids, he says he became a person his loved ones didn't recognize.
He lost a lucrative, long-held job as an investigator at a law firm. Public records show he was cited or charged with misdemeanors for leaving the scene of a car accident he doesn't remember having. He has no memory of events like watching his daughter graduate from high school.
"I became a zombie," he said.
By the spring of 2013, he was downing a staggering daily regimen of medication: A high dose of powerful Oxycontin two times a day, Oxycodone three times a day, along with benzodiazepines like Klonopin and Valium, plus Ambien, a sedative hypnotic sleep drug.
All, he says, were prescribed by the same Anchorage physician -- a man Lehe doesn't want to name and still believes was trying to help him.
"I don't think he had bad motives," he says.
One of his fragmented memories from the time: Sitting in the packed doctor's office waiting room, looking at faces as dazed as his own.
"They have tons of patients," he said. "I'd wait for hours."
Eventually, Lehe realized the medications were hurting not just him, but his family as well.
"I recognized that what I was doing wasn't working," he said.
So he went through medically supervised treatment to quit the pills. During that time, he says he had five seizures. The withdrawals were worse than the pain he had been trying to snuff out.
"It was some of the worst suffering I've ever done," he said.
Now, more than two years later, he's working with Sen. Bill Wielechowski, an Anchorage Democrat, on potential legislation in hopes of preventing others from falling into the same pit of dependence.
Lehe is one of Wielechowski's constituents in the northeast Anchorage district he represents in the state Senate.
The Alaska senator recently gave Lehe's wife Martha Gould-Lehe, a longtime Anchorage educator and the founder of the Alaska Native Cultural Charter School, a legislative citation. He's knocked on the Lehes' door while campaigning.
When his constituent contacted him, the two ended up sitting in Lehe's living room for two hours.
"I've certainly heard about this issue for years," Wielechowski said. "But to sit in someone's living room and hear about how it has personally devastated them, made me say 'we have to do something.'"
Public health officials here admit the state knows little about the volume of narcotic painkillers doctors are prescribing.
But they do know prescription opioids like Oxycontin are "tightly linked" to a heroin epidemic that is killing people here at a rate 42 percent higher than the national average, said Jay Butler, the director of the state Division of Public Health.
Lehe says he never used nonprescribed narcotics. But some others who develop a dependence on prescribed opioids eventually make the switch to cheap, potent street drugs, according to public health officials.
Like 48 other states, Alaska has a prescription-drug tracking program meant to alert doctors of a patient's drug-seeking behavior, raising a red flag if they're getting painkillers from several providers at once, said Butler.
But the program isn't widely known among physicians, Butler said. And it doesn't allow state officials to monitor doctor prescribing behavior, which could alert officials to doctors running "pill mills" where patients may be over-prescribed narcotic painkillers without much monitoring.
Alaska is one of only a few states whose medical board has adopted no explicit guidelines on the use of controlled substances to treat pain.
Alaska also has no "pain clinic law," which requires state oversight of pain management clinics and practices. The federal Centers for Disease Control recommends pain clinic laws as a way of "stopping the most egregious over prescribing practices."
"There's so much we don't know," Butler said. Though he has not seen any proposed legislation, the state, he said, can and should be doing more to at a minimum gather data on the problem in order to make informed policy decisions.
"Alaskans are dying and we need to be able to address that," he said.
According to the Alaska Bureau of Vital Statistics, about 55 percent of all fatal drug overdoses in the state between 2008-2012 involved opioid pain relievers.
The potential legislation Wielechowski is working on is still very much in the research and drafting phase, he says.
"We're in the process of trying to figure out if people (see this) as a problem and what they think would be a reasonable solution."
So far he says he's hearing the answer is yes.
Among the actions other states have taken include requiring continuing education for doctors, warnings for patients and even limits on the dosage or duration of opioid prescriptions. Some of the strictest laws, like one passed in Washington state in 2011, impose restrictions on doctors when dosage levels are surpassed. They've had the unintended effect, critics say, of driving doctors from prescribing such drugs at all and leaving pain patients without access to needed medication.
Lehe would like to see patients better informed about the negatives of narcotic painkillers, and about alternative ways to treat pain. He especially wants to see patients warned about conditions like opioid-induced hyperalgesia, where a patient being treated with opioids may actually become more sensitive to pain.
Today, Lehe is doing better. He manages his pain without any narcotic medications. He's again working in the legal investigation field he loves. His family is intact.
But some lingering effects of seven years in an opioid fog are still with him. He has a hard time sleeping, and taking pleasure in things like social events or food.
Long-term opioid use can affect memory, balance and sleep, and can even cause cognitive impairment issues.
He's not totally comfortable putting his story in the spotlight and has had second thoughts about putting his name in the newspaper. But he's prepared to testify in Juneau on a bill. He thinks of the faces he used to see in the waiting room of his pain doctor.
"I'm not going to pretend to know how to solve this problem," he said. "But someone knows how."