On a sweltering summer’s day, Hilary Phelps sits inside Busboys and Poets enjoying an almond milk cappuccino and a skillet of sweet potato hash in her recently adopted neighborhood of Shirlington, VA. After a cataclysmic year, a bookstore cafe seems an apt setting for Phelps to reflect on this new chapter in her life—the one in which, after years of silence, she’s finally sharing her struggles with alcoholism, despite this being a time when her sobriety was truly tested.

“In 2022, I finalized my divorce, I moved, I launched a business, and my dad died,” says Phelps, mom to six-year-old Alexander. “By the end of the year, I had four of the top five life stressors. And after 15 years of sobriety, I wanted to drink badly—but I didn’t.”

Such outspokenness is something new for the 45-year-old Phelps, who is, of course, from that Phelps family—the oldest sister of Michael Phelps, the most decorated Olympic athlete in the history of the sport and someone who has revealed his own mental health struggles, a fact that helped encourage Hilary to find her own voice.

Ever since she stopped drinking, sobriety has formed the backdrop to her life. Recovery is always there, like background noise, a constant reminder to stay the course. But for all the ongoing work it has taken her to stay sober, the secrecy surrounding her sobriety has only added to the burden.

“I worried, what if I share this truth and then people don’t like me? If I could help one person not feel alone, it would be worth it,” she says. “But it took me 15 years to get to that point of being able share that openly and to be okay with people not liking me.”

So last May, when Pete Sousa, her friend from their college days at the University of Richmond, asked her to appear on his podcast, The Payoff with Pete, in conjunction with Mental Health Awareness Month, Phelps, a public figure in her own right, knew it was time to talk about her experience. (When your brother is one of the most recognizable athletes in the world, you become a little famous yourself.)

On the day the podcast aired, the public-relations veteran dispatched an all-points-bulletin to her 48,000 friends and followers across social media—just in case anyone had missed her message. Along with a spare black-and-white portrait of herself, she posted: “In June 2007, I voluntarily walked into a treatment center and asked for help. I was scared, I felt alone, and I didn’t know what to do, but I couldn’t stop drinking. My inner light was burned out and I had lost every bit of who I was. It truly felt like a dark night of the soul.”

“I’m so proud of her,” says Phelps’ mother, Debbie, executive director for the Education Foundation of Baltimore County Public Schools. “She’s asked herself, ‘How can I grow from it? What can I do that people will take away?’ The more people who are in the spotlight saying, ‘I’m normal like everyone else,’ the better. There are a lot of people sharing the stories of their journeys about things that have been in the closet for a very long time—it’s healthy and it’s good for people to hear.”

And it’s been healthy for Phelps to share, too. With her perfect posture and sinewy strength, she radiates confidence and vitality. If you didn’t know that she battled severe addiction, you’d never guess it. But she’s worked a lifetime to get here.

Phelps was born on March 17, 1978, at St. Joseph Medical Center in Towson. “I was born on St. Patrick’s Day,” she says, smiling. “It’s fitting for an alcoholic—everyone wants to drink on your birthday.” At the time, the family was living in Whiteford in Harford County. Her sister, Whitney, two years her junior, was her best friend. “We caught crayfish, rode bikes, and played,” she says. “It was a free and fun childhood.”

She first learned to “swim” when she was six months old. With her father, Fred, in the pool, Debbie tossed her in the water, and she paddled to the surface. Seven years later, in 1985—the same year Michael was born—she joined a summer swim team in Jarrettsville. “I loved swimming,” she says. “I was gung-ho from the beginning.”

Before long, Phelps was bringing home respectable third-place trophies, but when she saw the larger first-place trophies other swimmers had earned, she wanted more. “My mom told me that the kids who win the big trophies were usually year-round swim- mers,” she recalls. Within a year of starting the summer swim league, she began swimming year-round with Renaissance All Sports Athletic Club in Bel Air, where she quickly set herself apart as a distance swimmer. As the fastest female on the team, she trained with older boys and was soon winning the tallest trophies.

While at a meet in Edgewater in 1987, Tom Himes, head coach for the North Baltimore Aquatic Club, recruited the nine-year-old to train at the small, elite swim club based at Meadowbrook pool in Mt. Washington. (Also a talented swimmer, kid sister Whitney trained at the same time and later Michael trained there, too.)

By age 11, Phelps was swimming six days a week, three of which entailed waking up at 3:45 a.m. to make it to Meadowbrook to spend two hours in the water before the start of the school day, then heading back to the pool for several hours of swimming after school. By 1990, Phelps was a phenom, the fastest distance swimmer in the country for her age group. “I was tracking my time with Janet Evans, who was at the time at Stanford University and the fastest distance swimmer in the world,” says Phelps. “She was an Olympian—and I wanted to be her.”

Out of the water, she was equally driven. By sixth grade, she was a straight-A student at Southampton Middle School with her own sense of style, short, permed hair, and red Sally Jessy Raphael-style glasses—all of which made her a middle-school mark. “I had stretchy pants and lace-up ballet flats,” she says. To this day, her main memory is the taunting she endured from the popular girls.

“I can still see it,” she says. “These three girls are walking toward me, and they’re like, ‘Nice shoes.’ Later that day, I was flying to a meet in Atlanta, where they fly the top two from North Baltimore, but I felt sad. That was a turning point—I wasn’t good enough anymore.”

Seventh grade at Dumbarton Middle, prompted by the family’s move to Baltimore County, was no better. She had a friend or two but other than that, she says, “no one talked to me.” Vowing to fit in, she grew her hair long and ditched the glasses for contacts. By eighth grade she had moved up the middle school social ladder and was hanging out with the cool kids.

At 14, her substance abuse began with Milwaukee’s Best beer and smoking pot to quiet the insecurity and growing sadness and further fit in. “I remember thinking, ‘This will make me feel better,’” says Phelps, whose paternal grandparents were “problem drinkers,” though never outwardly identified as alcoholics.

In high school, she became increasingly dependent on alcohol, guzzling cheap wine and whatever else she could get her hands on. “I’d drink Wild Irish Rose,” she says, “because I was like, ‘Wine is fancy, and beer is disgusting.’ I’d stand outside a liquor store in Towson with a friend, and we’d call it, ‘Hey, Mister.’ We’d stand there with a $20 bill and say, ‘Hey, mister, can you buy us some Boone’s Farm?’ We’d split a bottle and stay at her parent’s house and steal their liquor, putting vodka in our Gatorade bottles.” Unsurprisingly, Phelps’ swimming career began to suffer. (In the meantime, Whitney’s star was rising, which only added to Phelps’ feelings of inadequacy. At age 14, Whitney was third in the world for the 200-meter butterfly.)

In 1996, by the time Phelps attended the University of Richmond on a full athletic scholarship, her addiction—sometimes that meant three bottles of wine a night—was in full force. “I blacked out every time I drank,” says Phelps, who experienced kidney pain and would find bruises on her body from falling the night before but had been so smashed she had no memory of it. “I never knew where I’d wake up or who I’d be with. College is an open invitation to party, and addiction can go undetected—it’s a breeding ground for drinking.”

While Phelps was alienating everyone around her—“alcohol was my best friend,” she says—others were starting to take note. In her senior year, her swimming coach punished her by making her the only one on the team of four without a captain’s title. And her friends staged an unsuccessful intervention. “I was like, ‘This is college, this is what you’re supposed to do.’”

Debbie knew that her daughter partied but had no idea she had a problem. “I didn’t think it was an issue, but a phase she was going through,” says Debbie, who calls her oldest daughter the “keystone” of the family.

After college graduation in 2000, Phelps’ disease continued to consume her. Her family traveled to Sydney to watch a 15-year-old Michael compete in his first Olympics, a fact that still lights up her face when she talks about it. But mixed with those good memories is one that still stings: She was prohibited from climbing across the Sydney Harbour Bridge, the city’s number-one tourist attraction. “You have to take a Breathalyzer first,” says Phelps, “and I was too drunk from the night before to be able to go.”

At the next summer Olympics, this time Athens in 2004, she and Whitney were guests at an epic Sports Illustrated party on a cliff overlooking the Aegean.

“We climbed up on this stage and we were dancing, and they made us get down,” she says. “But the next day, this man was like, ‘You guys had a lot of fun last night, you must have been drunk,’ and I literally said, ‘I wasn’t that drunk. I remember everything that happened last night.’ That was my barometer—if I remembered, it meant I wasn’t that drunk.”

For the following two years, Phelps tried to limit her drinking and made several attempts to quit, but her abstinence never lasted long. “Because I didn’t want to give it up, I was doing everything I could to control it,” she says. “I was like, ‘I’m only going to have one glass of wine tonight.’ I was lying in bed and my body and skin were burning. I was anxious and felt like I wanted to crawl out of my skin. I went to the bathroom and drank a bottle of NyQuil that’s what this disease does to you.”

“AT SOME POINT, YOU EITHER CONTINUE TO DRINK AND BURY THE SHAME OR YOU ASK FOR HELP.”

Things went from bad to worse when Phelps began living in Adams Morgan on her own, roommate-free for the first time. Within the first 10 days, she went on a series of benders, including drinking two bottles of wine by herself at home, then heading to the nearby Holiday Inn, where she gulped six more glasses in 30 minutes just before closing. As she continued to spiral, she knew she needed help.

“At some point, you either continue to drink and bury the shame or you take that other fork in the road and ask for help,” she says. Her ex-boyfriend also sounded the alarm. “[After my move,] I don’t know if I had drunk-dialed him or texted him,” says Phelps, “but he called and said, ‘If you don’t get help, I’m going to tell your family just how bad this is.’”

On Monday, June 11, 2007, after a final round of binge drinking the prior weekend, the then-29-year-old checked herself in to Kolmac, an outpatient addiction treatment center in the East End neighborhood of D.C., just a few blocks from where she lived. In the days that followed, she had intensive outpatient therapy for eight weeks and attended daily, sometimes twice-daily, 12-step meetings and then continued her care for 18 more months, including weekly group therapy sessions.

At the same time, she worked full-time as an event planner at a nonprofit—and told no one about her recovery efforts.  “I was living a double life,” says Phelps, who recalls wandering the aisles of a Target in Alexandria until midnight because she didn’t want to be alone with her thoughts. “I didn’t want to drink, but I didn’t know what else to do, so I went to Target.”

As she started to recover, the first few months were the most daunting. “All those feelings I had stuffed down for 15 years started making their way up and out,” she says. “I’d feel so good one day, then it would swing so drastically to the other side—when people get sober, they don’t know how to manage their emotions. That’s why we drank in the first place.”

It’s been far from easy, but Phelps has stayed fully committed to sobriety, while building a new life for herself in the wake of a devastating divorce. In the past year, she has launched her own public-relations agency, Hilary Phelps Creative, and is a certified yoga and Pilates teacher, addiction recovery coach, and motivational speaker. She leans on good friends whom she jokes are her “board of directors” and takes zero risks when it comes to drinking—even refraining from imbibing non-alcoholic drinks in restaurants (unless they come from a can), having once been served a gin and tonic by mistake. She still attends 12-step meetings, meditates daily, and has pursued alternate therapies—some traditional, like Reiki, and others a bit more unusual, like Kambo, aka “frog medicine,” which causes the participant to purge.

When her father unexpectedly died in his sleep last fall, her alcohol cravings returned with a vengeance. “I was like, ‘What I want to do is go to a bar, find a stranger, get super hammered, and spend the next week drunk and checked out,’” she admits.

Instead, two days after the funeral, she and her friend Charlie Engle, himself sober for 31 years, drove to Ashley Addiction Treatment center in Havre de Grace. “She hadn’t really been very in-touch with the rehab world since her early years of sobriety,” says Engle, who just happened to be headed to the treatment center where he works as a brand ambassador when Phelps called to say she needed support. “I ambushed her in a way. I said, ‘I need you to speak for 15 minutes and tell these 100 people who have less than 30 days of sobriety what it’s like to have 15 years.’ I was worried about her—and I knew it would be powerful for them and change her whole perspective.”

In that moment, Phelps took a deep breath and stepped up to the podium to give an impromptu speech to the crowd of recovering addicts. “‘After 15 years, I wanted to check out, but drinking isn’t going to bring back my dad and it’s not going to make me feel better, because then I’ll have to do [rehab] again,”’ she said, ‘“and there’s no guarantee that if I drink, I’ll come back. I might lose my child, total a car, lose every friend I’ve ever had, and die alone.’ Someone came up to me afterward and handed me a note and said, ‘I was going to leave treatment tomorrow, but your story was so fucking powerful—I’m going to stay.’ I still have that note on my refrigerator.”

Sharing her story has marked a crucial stage in her recovery. “I encouraged her to tell her story,” says Engle, who became an ultra-endurance athlete on his road to finding sobriety. “I told her, ‘You’re never going to live completely in the sober world until you fully share your story. The fact that you’ve gone to so much trouble to hide it and the amount of work it has taken to do that is not helping.’ Once she shared her story, her transformation was almost instantaneous—it was one of those crux moments.”

In addition to finding sobriety, Phelps has found her way back to herself.

“When I first went to rehab, they told us to go home, look at ourselves in the mirror, and say, ‘I love you’–and I couldn’t do it,” she says. “Now when I look in the mirror, I see freedom and peace and joy and happiness and strength. At 45, this is where my story starts. The past doesn’t define us, it’s just part of our story. With recovery and getting sober, I get a second chance at life, and I don’t want to fuck it up. We’re all healing from something, and sobriety is just the vehicle in which I share my story of survival and healing.”

As a leading addiction treatment center, does Father Martin’s Ashley have a typical patient?
No. We have people from all walks of life. We have 18-year-olds and 80-year-olds, men and women, professionals and college kids, married, divorced, never married, clergy, doctors, lawyers, nurses. The common thread is the addiction. About 50 percent have alcohol dependence as their primary disorder. Another 30 percent have opiate/opioid dependence as their primary disorder, but we treat all the drugs.

Do you use the 12-step program?
The co-founders [Father Joseph Martin and Mae Abraham] wanted to develop a program that would treat people very respectfully, as people having an illness rather than a disgraceful disorder. We are 12-step-based, but we’ve broadened that. We focus on a holistic approach. It looks at their whole life, including their mind, body, spirit and community.

Are there degrees of addiction? Can someone be a minor alcoholic?
Yeah, actually, the new diagnostic criteria have mild, moderate, and severe categories. And it’s not only the amount of drug or alcohol consumed, it’s how far out the negative ripples go in terms of the effect on their lives.

Why does one person become an addict and another doesn’t?
The biggest factor is our genetics. Fifty percent is determined by genetics. It is an illness that is transmitted in families genetically, but also socially; there are learned behaviors.

Are you able to identify who will succeed after treatment?
It’s often hard to predict. Sometimes there are people we think are going to be successful and we’re shocked that they relapse fairly quickly. Other times, we didn’t have confidence in somebody’s ability to stay in recovery and then were totally shocked that they’ve gotten themselves stable. Stable relationships and being able to maintain employment, those are good predictors of success.

Can you think of some improbable success stories you’ve seen?
One young man comes to mind. He came from a professional family and he went off to college and got addicted to heroin. He came to Ashley for treatment and he seemed to do well. Really pleasant young man. We discharged him, and he relapsed. He returned to Ashley for his second treatment and at this treatment he went to a halfway house when he left treatment and he’s done extremely well. He’s gone on to maintain a life of recovery. He’s gotten married. He has a baby. He’s doing well. He’s certainly a success story.

Another man, someone from our pain recovery program, had sustained a very severe injury at his job and was quite disabled. As a result of his injuries, he developed chronic pain, became addicted to his pain medicines, then got addicted to heroin. Then—this was a man who was employed—he ended up living on the street for several years as a heroin addict and was really plagued by the chronic pain as well. It just really didn’t get better. He came into our treatment program. His first admission lasted about 24 hours and he left; he was not happy. He left treatment and about four to six weeks later, he returned [to] our pain recovery program. He did extremely well. We were able to do a detoxification from the opiates. He was not pain-free, but he was far more comfortable. His socialization improved. His mood improved. He went onto a halfway house. We moved him to a climate that was more suitable for his chronic pain and he has done well in that setting and has been an example for other young men in that setting. He was really an inspiration.

How concerning is the rise of opioid addiction?
Opioid addiction is a huge concern because of the heroin-related emergency department visits. In Harford County [where Father Martin’s Ashley is located], heroin-related intoxication deaths have increased by 191 percent between 2007 and 2014. One of the motivations for Father Martin’s Ashley getting involved in our [new] outpatient program was concern in Harford County about the number of overdoses that presented to our local hospitals. There’s also an increase in the number of babies born in opioid withdrawal in the U.S. We also need to talk about alcohol. Alcohol is still a lethal drug. Alcohol-related intoxication deaths have increased by 266 percent in the county.

Really? That doesn’t get nearly as much attention in the media.
No, it doesn’t. There’s not this huge rise in alcohol use disorders that we see in opiates and opioids, but it’s still the most common drug of abuse out there. And it’s associated with so much trauma: traffic accidents, pedestrian accidents, boating accidents, domestic violence.

What’s your position on decriminalization?
Individuals who have a substance-use disorder should be able to get the treatment they need to be able to live a life in recovery. Addiction isn’t a moral failing. After years of research, the medical community has learned that it is a disease of the brain. It’s a public health issue. I don’t know if you remember Kurt Schmoke, but he was our first mayor who said we should be looking at addiction in the City of Baltimore as a public health problem, not as a legal problem.

Yeah, it’s an idea that’s been around, but it has recently gained more mainstream acceptance.
I think there has been a huge push to think about addiction as a chronic illness, a relapsing illness and de-stigmatizing addiction. It can be viewed more as a medical problem than a legal problem.

To that end, Father Martin’s Ashley started a pain recovery program, right?
It’s about three years old, and this is for people who have chronic pain who have become dependent on their prescription medications. Most of them have sustained some injury or have had chronic medical problems resulting in the chronic pain. Our goal for them is to increase their functioning, increase their activity, detox them from their pain medications because often the medicines are no longer effective, and improve their overall quality of life. That program is really quite separate from our main program with a focus on physical therapy, physical activity, really looking at pain and their dependence on drugs.

At 7:43 a.m., on a clear, otherwise picture-perfect morning, the first day of October, Baltimore County Vice Narcotics and Gang Enforcement Team officers—in full tactical gear with weapons drawn—begin yelling and pounding on the front door of a four-bedroom, two-and-a-half bath, two-and-a-quarter acre brick home on Manor Road in Phoenix. If they’re not up already, families in this bucolic neighborhood will be soon, trying to get their kids off to school. One next-door neighbor comes outside, concerned that there’s been some sort of medical emergency.

“Police with a search warrant!” the officers bellow. “Open the door! Police with a search warrant! Open the door!”

The home’s windows are open—it had been that kind of breezy, autumn sleeping weather the night before—but there’s no response from inside the house. And now the police, having announced their presence, break through the door with a battering ram. Just inside, standing in the living room near one of the two sofas, officers immediately identify 50-year-old commercial insurance broker Francis “Chip” Carnes. But initially, they are unable to locate the target of their search warrant—Carnes’s fiancée, attorney Jill Swerdlin—though they do locate her 8-year-old son in an upstairs bedroom.

Eventually, police discover Swerdlin in the basement of the $370,000 home, near a washbasin—there’s a Ziploc-type baggie with white residue atop the sink’s drain. Handcuffed and brought upstairs, Swerdlin, still in a long nightshirt, is told to sit in the living room across from Carnes, also in handcuffs, where both are read their rights per Miranda. That’s when Det. Douglas Kriete, a thickly built, goateed, ponytailed, 31-year police veteran, asks the couple if there is anything illegal in the house. Carnes, again, not the target named in the warrant, tells Kriete that there may be “some old smoking devices”—the words from the police report—meaning crack pipes, in the bedroom. Swerdlin concurs, according to the same police report, adding that there are guns in the basement inside a safe near where she was found by police.

None of this, however, is why the police are here.

A self-described “Jewish mother of two kids” from a prominent Baltimore County family of attorneys, Swerdlin, 47, was the focus of a five-month investigation and grand jury indictment, with prosecutors alleging that she was the center of a “hub and spoke” conspiracy to distribute illegal prescription drugs. The indictment alleges Swerdlin, a former public defender in private criminal defense practice for the past five years, provided legal services in exchange for illegal prescription drugs; possessed and distributed controlled substances, including oxycodone; conspired to distribute illegal prescription drugs; and—this was the kicker that sparked media attention when she was arrested—smuggled illegal prescription drugs into the Baltimore County Detention Center.

But while being questioned, Swerdlin initially refuses to talk about her role in obtaining or exchanging illegal prescription drugs, according to police. Only when Kriete threatens to end the interview and simply take her away, he testifies later, does Swerdlin open up to his more obliging, younger partner—the “good cop/bad cop” routine. Once her son has been fed breakfast and walked to the bus stop at the end of driveway, Swerdlin, who would certainly be expected to understand what’s she’s agreeing to do, appears to come clean.

This is what she wrote:

“In 2009 I was in a serious car accident and due to my injuries I was prescribed oxycodone. After approximately a year my dr. discontinued my prescription. I was still in pain and addicted to oxycodone so I purchased them from people who were selling them for money. I have given other people pills who needed them and I have asked other people close to me to get them for me. I am ashamed about my behavior especially because I am an officer of the court and have been a professional for 23 years.”

Then, potentially damaging, in terms of legal consequences—Swerdlin also participates in a written Q & A. In response to detectives’ questioning, she affirms, among other things, that she involved her 28-year-old legal assistant (charged with possession and intent to distribute) in oxycodone exchanges and that she brought, on one occasion, illegal prescription drugs to a client jailed at the Baltimore County Detention Center to increase her fee. She gives up the names of 11 people from whom she received oxycodone pills, including former clients with violent histories. And when detectives also ask if she provided oxycodone to her 20-year-old son Brett, who has pled guilty to one count of possession of a controlled and dangerous substance in an arrest related to the investigation, she writes, “Yes.”

TOWSON-BASED CRIMINAL DEFENSE ATTORNEY JILL SWERDLIN AFTER HER ARREST ON PRESCRIPTION DRUG DISTRIBUTION CHARGES

That would seem like case closed. Police take “green dot,” pre-paid debit cards from the house, confiscate a cellphone, planner, and receipt book as evidence—as well as a couple of pills, more baggies, vials, and paraphernalia. End of the story; except it’s not. Seven months later, in a Baltimore County Circuit Court criminal motions hearing this past May 16, Swerdlin—tall, slim, in a conservative black dress, sweater, and heels—claims her civil rights were violated by officers and that a quid pro quo offer was made by detectives.

Fidgeting, shooting glances back at Carnes (who was eventually charged with possession of cocaine and paraphernalia) from the defense table—and told at one point to “sit still” by Judge Timothy L. Martin—an understandably anxious Swerdlin and her attorney argue that her statement, particularly that less sympathetic Q & A, should be thrown out. In the meantime, the Attorney Grievance Commission of Maryland has sought an injunction to stop Swerdlin from practicing, alleging professional misconduct in a civil suit, including misleading clients about her ability to influence judges, and accepting money for legal services and then failing to provide those services. Swerdlin and Carnes also face a forfeiture suit regarding the shotguns (essentially Carnes’s hunting rifles) located in the Manor Road house because of the proximity to alleged illegal narcotics.

Then there are other personal things to contend with: Her Pikesville townhouse is in foreclosure; there are contract and tort claims being brought against her by two former clients; plus, family issues—her son Brett is living in a North Carolina recovery house, while his father, her first ex-husband, has stopped talking to her. Swerdlin, who agreed to be interviewed for this story even as she faces a plea hearing in mid-June, says she’s been clean and sober ever since her arrest and subsequent treatment, but it’s a lot for anyone deal with, let alone someone trying to recover from drug addiction.

But there’s still the broader question. How exactly does all this suddenly happen to a former St. Paul’s School mom with no previous criminal record? Why, for example, do Baltimore County police and addiction specialists say they aren’t surprised anymore that an upscale lawyer, following a doctor’s prescription for pain medication (at least initially), finds herself hustling pills from convicted drug dealers? Just how bad is the prescription painkiller problem in the suburbs?

If the stereotype persists that somehow this country’s drug problem is an inner city, “urban” crisis—read: low-income, poorly educated blacks or Latinos using crack cocaine or heroin—it’s time to put an end to that notion. And if the belief persists that soaring prescription opiate abuse in the U.S. is somehow relegated to Appalachia or some other poverty-stricken region where unemployed white people live—it’s time to put that notion to bed, too.

One good way to get a handle on the extent of the prescription drug problem is to look at the hard data on accidental overdoses.

In 2010, prescription drugs killed more than 22,100 people in the U.S.—triple the number from a decade ago, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC)—and more than twice that of cocaine and heroin combined. What’s more, opiate pill addiction is now being blamed for reversing an earlier decline in heroin-related overdoses. Two years ago, the Maryland Department of Health reported that heroin-related overdoses had begun to spike again, and they linked the uptick to prescription opiate use that eventually becomes heroin use when the addict can no longer find or afford prescription opiates.

Most dramatically, recent studies show that for the first-time, more deaths are attributed to drug overdoses than car accidents or gun violence. But still think someone from Swerdlin’s demographic is an atypical drug addict or that it’s largely a teenage problem? According to the CDC, prescription drug overdose rates are highest, by far, among whites when compared to African-Americans or Latinos, and also highest among those aged 35-54—with both rates continuing to climb. Prescription overdose death rates among women, in particular, have reached unprecedented levels, increasing 400 percent from 1999 to 2010.

“This cuts across all boundaries, all levels of society,” says Mike Gimbel, Baltimore County’s former “drug czar” for 25 years. “And it is a huge problem in the private schools. But when teenagers start experimenting with pills today, they usually begin in their parents’ bathroom cabinet.”

And yet all of this is still a fairly recent development. It wasn’t that long ago, in 2006, that the Baltimore County Police Department first deemed it necessary to create a new narcotics unit, the pharmaceutical drug diversion team, specifically to tackle the crisis of the illegal distribution of prescription pills. That first unit only had two officers. Today, the unit is managed by a corporal and a sergeant, who oversee five detectives. In 2013, the unit made 305 arrests, including 168 for felonies, many including violent offenses, and they executed 52 search-and-seizure warrants like the one that brought them to Manor Road—far surpassing the numbers for any other illegal drugs.

Baltimore County police sergeant Bruce Vaughn notes this was all accomplished despite the unit’s having to overcome greater obstacles than other narcotic units, because they’re going after a black market for drugs that are legal when prescribed correctly. Also, HIPAA privacy laws can bog down background investigative work. “These can be complicated cases,” Sgt. Vaughn says. “Like investigating financial crimes.”

According to law enforcement, prescription drugs have become a driver of criminal activity because so much money is involved. The going rate is now $30 for a single 30 mg pill, compared to, say, $10 for a small amount of heroin—and that, for all intents and purposes, prescription drugs have become street drugs. They’re often trafficked by the same people who sell heroin, coke, and marijuana, often violent offenders. The former client Swerdlin allegedly smuggled drugs to inside prison is there on armed robbery charges. He has also been charged with attempted murder in the past. In fact, a number of those initially charged in the indictment with Swerdlin have been found guilty of distributing other drugs previously. Four are former clients and a couple have faced armed robbery and firearm charges.

“We could use five more detectives,” Kriete says. “The prescription drugs take up more than triple [the time] of anything else we deal with.”

Gimbel, himself a longtime recovering heroin addict from Pikesville, calls prescription painkiller drugs like OxyContin “heroin in a bottle” and says that 80 percent of the calls he receives today from families seeking help for a loved one are related to prescription drug abuse. “It used to be 5 percent.” He says anyone taking these powerful pain medications every day for 30 days will begin to build a tolerance—inevitably suffer withdrawal symptoms—and that it should be protocol for every patient to go through a medically supervised detoxification program. “Look, this stuff isn’t coming from Central America, Columbia, Peru, or Southeast Asia,” Gimbel continues. “It’s doctors that are prescribing this stuff.”

Once addicted, he and other recovering addicts say, all bets are off.

“You cross every line that you think you’ll never cross,” says Linda Y., a former Johns Hopkins nurse who was fired for shooting up pain medication intended for patients in the bathroom at work. (She asked to remain anonymous in accordance with 12-step tradition.) The assumption is that a lawyer or nurse, or any suburban professional for that matter, lives two lives once they become an addict, but that’s not true, Linda says. “It’s one life,” she says. “It all revolves around getting what you need.”

She adds that the problem of prescription drug abuse is particularly acute in the world of health care providers given the access that doctors, nurses, pharmacists, and others have to medication—and notes that 12-step meetings in the Roland Park, Rodgers Forge, and Homewood areas are frequented by individuals in those industries. Linda went through a three-year, Maryland Board of Nursing discipline and rehabilitation program, including treatment and drug screens, to earn back full practicing credentials, adding, “I wish it had been five years like it is today. I needed it. It really helped me.”

Bob D., a 49-year-old lawyer who went through treatment for prescription drug addiction at Father Martin’s Ashley’s two-year pain recovery program in Havre de Grace, was initially prescribed medication for a rare neurological condition. But ultimately, the “cure” for his pain became worse than the underlying problem. He hid his addiction as long as possible, “doctor shopping” (going from one doctor to the next, hoping each would authorize a new prescription) and keeping the true number of pills he was taking from his neurologist and partner. “I was obsessed with my ’scripts,” he says. “I started with a pill every day like I was picking up my morning coffee. It was three or four years of a living hell.”

In fact, one of the things Bob says he learned at Father Martin’s Ashley was that drugs used to treat chronic pain, like oxycodone and hydrocodone, are not only addictive and potentially deadly—“my greatest fear was that I would forget how many I took and not wake up one morning”—but often don’t work long-term for chronic conditions. And these drugs can actually create a change in the neurological system where people develop hyperalgesia and become far more sensitive to pain than when they started out on these drugs. Today, Bob follows a routine he began at Father Martin’s Ashley that includes A.A. meetings, meditation, prayer, deep-stretching exercises, and some yoga to treat both his addiction and chronic pain. He reports he’s begun playing tennis again for the first time in years.

Ground up and snorted, or injected, which some abusers do, prescription pain pills can mimic the high of heroin, but even in pill form, opiates can create a false sense of euphoria and well-being, which is part of their insidious nature, says Dr. Carol Bowman, a Father Martin’s Ashley addiction specialist. “An injury sends a message to the brain. The medication, however, blocks the neuroreceptors and sends those signals away—but it also blocks all pain signals,” Bowman says. “It doesn’t distinguish if it’s anxiety, depression, or physical pain.” She adds that it doesn’t take long, either, for the drugs to confuse the brain’s normal “feel-good” chemical processes. “When they stop being taken, they suppress the brain’s natural production of dopamaine, our natural reward system, which also begins another downward spiral.”

Gimbel—who says he’s seen weekend warriors with knee and back injuries get hooked—believes there’s also a deeper societal component underlying the problem. “Everyone who gets admitted to the hospital today is asked to assess themselves for pain on a scale of zero to 10—that wasn’t always the case,” he says. “The target is always zero with the pharmaceutical companies pushing their products, so doctors try to get everyone down to zero. It’s like no one is supposed to experience pain anymore. It’s, ‘Here take a pill.’”

“And of course, all of this is just treating the symptoms,” Bowman adds, “not the actual causes of the original pain, which is what we should be examining.”

It’s this dual track—the physiological and psychological—that makes addiction, and treating addiction, tricky to fully understand, says Dr. Michael Fingerhood, director of the division of Chemical Dependency at Bayview Medical Center. There is a genetic component to addiction that makes some people more susceptible; there is a “phenomenological” component (i.e., stressful events or periods); and there’s the purely physiological aspect (the physical cravings)—particularly with the powerful round of painkiller drugs that were introduced en masse a little more than a decade ago.

“These are not your mother’s Valium or a drink after work: ‘Tough day, I think I’ll have a Percocet.’ But people think they are because they’re prescribed,” Fingerhood says. “I’m not surprised at all that people get to a place where they don’t know who they are anymore and can’t ask for help. Prescription drug addiction is the elephant in the room. It’s the epidemic no one talks about.”

A few days after her mid-May criminal motions hearing, outside a bustling Panera Bread cafe in the Hunt Valley Towne Centre shopping complex, Swerdlin—calmer than she appeared in court, dressed in a sleeveless white blouse, her hair colored a darker hue than in her smiling mug shot—recalls the car accident that ultimately led to her addiction, and to her journey from defense attorney to defendant. She’ll never forget the date; it was her 44th birthday, Jan. 6, 2009.

“I was leaving the Baltimore County courthouse, headed for Wabash Avenue, and it was raining. I was going about 5 mph on Allegheny [Avenue], trying to see, my view was obstructed, and I got T-boned,” she says. “My BMW was totaled, and I was taken to the hospital.” Police reports aren’t clear about who was at fault, but Swerdlin says the young driver of the other car was speeding. Her car did a 180-degree spin, and though she was wearing her seat belt, her face smashed against the empty passenger seat, badly damaging an eye socket and fracturing her cheek. “Of course, when I left the hospital,” she says, “I had the prescription for oxycodone.”

Her doctor cut off her prescription approximately a year later. But she says she needed oral surgery, which led to another prescription. She also says that she hit up friends and family members from time to time for pills, telling them that she didn’t feel well for one reason or another. “I didn’t go the doctor route [doctor shopping] and didn’t want to go through insurance,” she says, adding that she was “professionally, ethically, morally too proud” to have that on her medical records. Instead, she says, she found it easier to get what she needed from clients she was representing, who had been accused of drug dealing.

“Being a criminal defense attorney made it accessible,” Swerdlin says. “I started taking on clients who were drug clients. I started getting a good reputation from defending drug dealers, trying to get them into drug rehab and drug court, and I got to where I was making good money dealing with high-level people.”

She was eventually taking “five to seven” pills a day, starting first thing in the morning, then spread throughout the day, and “not eating lunch for years” while she hurried to track down pills, argue her cases, and make it to school to pick up her youngest son.

She also says that her addiction was “at low level for a long time, probably until six months to a year” before her arrest and “then it went from zero to 60 in a hurry.” She says that she was able to keep her use and behavior a secret from those closest to her, and that Carnes “had no idea” why the police broke into the house last fall.

Court records, police testimony, and allegations from other clients suggest life began getting unmanageable for Swerdlin before last fall, however. For starters, it was not long after her accident in 2009 that her name began to regularly appear as a defendant. Initially, it was for minor things. In 2010, there was a contempt charge that was dropped. Then there were a number of traffic violations, starting in 2011—driving with an expired tag, failing to produce a vehicle registration card, and later driving with a suspended license and other charges. Also, in 2011, her condo association sued for late fees. There’s the foreclosure that begins in 2011. And, Baltimore County police say she popped up on their “radar” in January 2012—a year before she says her addiction become serious—as part of a separate and still ongoing investigation (although Swerdlin is not accused of running any sort of major drug ring).

The first claims of professional misconduct, including that she took money in return for legal services not provided, date back to the fall of 2012. But most of the seven allegations, all of which Swerdlin denies, occurred more recently, in 2013. Baltimore County assistant state’s attorney Jason League, who is prosecuting the Swerdlin case, notes that she continued to represent drug clients even after her arrest until the Attorney Grievance Commission of Maryland filed an injunction.

Her testimony at her criminal motions hearing also differed substantially from that of the four police officers called to the witness stand. She testified that she believed her house was being robbed and under attack, possibly from a disgruntled former client, when police pounded on her door. She says she heard, “Get down, this is a robbery,” not “Police with a search warrant! Open the door!” She also says that she was in the basement near the washbasin when found by police because she was trying to run from the house to get help. Taken with her allegation that male officers helped her get dressed—and not the female officer who was called to the scene—and claims that a quid pro quo was offered (that police told her they would not arrest her fiancé and she’d receive a better deal if she agreed to the Q & A), Judge Martin said in court that he did not find her testimony “terribly credible.”

Of course, disputes in court over the facts aren’t uncommon. At the same time, Swerdlin seems to be walking what could look like a fine line to a jury at the moment: admitting to addiction and obtaining and using illegal prescription drugs while declaring herself not guilty of the most serious crimes of which she is accused.

“I’m an addict,” Swerdlin says. “But I’m not guilty with what they are charging me.”

She also says in the interview at Panera Bread that the Baltimore County police only found a single piece of paraphernalia, a spoon owned by her 20-year-old son, in the search of her and Carnes’s home. (Reached by phone, her son would not comment.) But, according to police reports, four burnt pipes were found, and it was Carnes who was charged with possession, not her oldest son—who lived in her Pikesville townhome at the time. Nonetheless, she suggests that charges against Carnes will be dismissed if she accepts a plea.

As far as the allegations that she took payments in return for legal services not provided—in one case a judge has already ruled in favor of the plaintiff—or other accusations that she implied that she could influence judges, Swerdlin says, “Once people found out what happened to me,” referring to her arrest, “they started coming out of the woodwork, looking for money.”

And finally, she also claims she is being unfairly targeted by law enforcement officials because of her “elevated status” as an attorney. “I’m not being treated like everyone else,” she says. “The state is trying to make an example of me.”

Meanwhile, even as Swerdlin maintains she’s being unfairly treated by law enforcement and prosecutors, she weaves 12-step lingo into the conversation, speaking about taking things “one day a time.”

After being bailed out of jail by Carnes, she entered the Kolmac Clinic’s intensive outpatient program on the campus of Sheppard Pratt. She’s says she goes to A.A. meetings on a daily basis and that it was her 12-step sponsor who was with her all day at her criminal motions hearing.

She says that she believes in God and that everything happens for a reason, and if she had to go through this to become an example for others—a cautionary tale, as it were—so be it.

She admits that her arrest has been “devastating,” but that she has also gotten a great deal of support, receiving, she says, more than 200 messages and e-mails from friends, family, and colleagues. She does admit that she “lied to judges, lied to people, and lied to people that could’ve probably helped me.”

And whatever the outcome of her legal case, successful recovery from addiction remains a fraught road for anyone, requiring life-long care, as with other chronic diseases, such as diabetes, to which addiction treatment and recovery is often compared. Studies show that the majority of those in recovery do relapse, often requiring additional treatment. Fingerhood, the Bayview addiction specialist, estimates that about half of those seeking treatment for opiate addiction and also receiving drugs such as buprenorphine or methadone to stave off cravings, are able to attain “sustainable abstinence”—defined as one year clean and sober. Without medication help, he says, “It’s about 10 percent.”

As her nearly two-hour interview is concluding, Swerdlin says her sponsor tells her that it will take the same length of time off drugs, as on them, before she will even begin to feel like her self again, and she acknowledges that jail is a possibility. “I’ve never been in trouble and hopefully the 43 years before my addiction [will] all be considered,” she says. “I’m happy that my two children have good fathers. If I have to go to jail and do time, then I will do what I have to do.”

She intimates, however, that plea negotiations are imminent, and that disbarment with the possibility of applying for reinstatement five or so years down the line is a more likely scenario than a prison sentence.

If necessary, she says, she will re-invent herself.

“Who knows?” she says. “Maybe I’ll write a book about this one day if I lose my license.”

EDITOR’S NOTE: This story will appear in our July 2014 issue, on newsstands later this month.

UPDATE (June 15, 5 p.m.):

Towson-based attorney Jill Swerdlin pled guilty to three charges this afternoon in Baltimore County Circuit Court related to the above story and faces jail time and disbarment, per her plea agreement with the Baltimore County State’s Attorney’s Office.

Swerdlin pled guilty to the distribution of buprenorphine, a drug used to treat opioid addiction, and the distribution of a controlled dangerous substance to a client incarcerated at the Baltimore County Detention Center. She also pled guilty to conspiracy to possess oxycodone.

The sentencing agreement, which will not be officially disposed until the end of July, calls for a maximum 5-year prison sentence for Swerdlin, with all but 18 months suspended. Swerdlin will not be eligible for home detention during her 18-month sentence, but will eligible for work release and may apply for parole. She also consented to disbarment as part of her plea.

Other plea agreement stipulations include three years of parole and probation, drug treatment, and random urinalysis.

Also as part of the deal, Swerdlin, a criminal defense attorney, agreed to meet with prosecutors and Baltimore County Detention Center officials to reveal everything she knows about drug smuggling efforts at the jail. Jason League, assistant state’s attorney for Baltimore County and lead prosecutor on the case, said changes have already been made since Swerdlin’s arrest to improve security at the jail.

According to the plea terms, Swerdlin may also seek to modify her sentence—essentially seek a probation before judgment final disposition—if she successfully completes all of her required stipulations, enabling her, potentially, to regain her law license down the road.

Three others indicted in the Swerdlin conspiracy case have already pled guilty and a fourth is expected to plea guilty next week, according to prosecutors. Six other people charged in the conspiracy still have their cases open.

“She’s different than just an addict because she had access to clients who were in a holding facility, and, as an officer of the court, she was abusing that access by smuggling drugs into prison,” League said afterwards. “Smuggling contraband into prison goes far beyond just that one client—many of the people there have drug problems and for them this is gold. So that becomes a huge problem and obviously, we have an obligation to uphold the integrity of our jails.”

League added that the broad prescription drug investigation that began in January of 2012, and led to Swerdlin’s arrest, remains ongoing.

Update: This article has been updated to contain a sponsored link from recovery.org.