A LEGACY OF PAIN AND PAINKILLERS

"This pain never goes away," Gary Roll once said of the jaw affliction that resulted from an oral surgery in which six impacted teeth were removed while he was in the Army.

On leaving the service, the Veterans Administration granted him a 50 percent service-related disability income.

Four years after the original operation, during which time he had been taking pain medications continuously, he was admitted to a veterans hospital with "long-standing chronic pain." He was prescribed penicillin and the powerful painkiller Percodan.

Doctors at the Mayo Clinic in Rochester, Minn., told him they could do nothing for him, that he would have to learn to live with the pain he likened to having a toothache on both sides of your jaw 24 hours a day with no hope of a cure.

By 1984, Roll had undergone three surgeries for treatment of the condition described as "bilateral mandibular hyperesthesia of the inferior alveolar nerve," a hypersensitivity of the nerve on both sides of the lower mouth.

Dr. J.L. Sheets, a Cape Girardeau oral surgeon, said a patient with such a condition is in "excruciating pain."

The diagnosis at the Veterans Administration Medical Center in St. Louis also noted his chronic depression and a possible narcotic dependency.

In 1989, Roll was admitted to a VA hospital for depression and chronic facial pain and prescribed Dilantin, Tegretol, Elavil and Percocet. Dilantin is an anti-epileptic drug also used to treat nerve pain. Tegretol is an anti-convulsant drug also used to treat pain along the course of a nerve. Elavil is an anti-depressant. Percocet is an addictive painkiller.

In November 1990 he was hospitalized for two months for dysthymic disorder -- severe depression -- and chronic pain syndrome and discharged with more drugs.

He was admitted to the VA Hospital in Poplar Bluff in 1991 after telling someone in the admissions office, "The pain kills me or I will kill somebody." Five weeks later he was discharged with an addictive anti-anxiety drug and a muscle relaxer.

His mother, Virginia, closed the family heating and air conditioning company in 1990. Roll said it was because of his hospitalizations.

Roll also was treated by his family doctor from 1975 to 1989. The physician noted a concern about his patient's use of codeine-related drugs.

Roll claimed he had been free from prescription painkillers for three or four months before breaking his leg in a fall from his roof in 1992, an accident which resulted in him taking pain medication again. He was hospitalized for four days later in the year because the fracture was not healing correctly. Roll was discharged with a muscle relaxer, an anti-depressant, anti-anxiety medication and Darvocet, a mild narcotic.

His brother, FBI agent Colvert Lee Roll Jr., told investigators his seriously depressed brother should not have been given pain medications that include codeine, a depressant.

Though an advocate of the death penalty, he contended his brother was not mentally competent "in view of his physical background."