As her abuse grew, so did her guilt. Mary said she would teach a lesson about the Word of Wisdom in her Young Women's class while high on Lortab. Then she would go home and pop more pills to help her deal with the guilt.

Mary started abusing Lortab after the birth of her fifth child. She quickly learned that she could fake a headache and make it last for a long time. Soon she began to come up with a number of illnesses. "I'd find out which (illnesses) could be diagnosed," she said.

She could stretch an appendicitis for two months' worth of Lortab prescriptions. Ovarian cysts, kidney stones, back pains. Mary said she could commonly fake any of the three and get more Lortab pills because doctors didn't check the validity of her illness. "Doctors won't touch your back," she said.

Mary later learned the dentist was another source for Lortab. She would make a toothache last for months.

Other women told the Deseret News they would get root canals they didn't need just to get the prescription.

Some people have let their teeth rot on purpose so they could get a prescription for the powerful painkiller, Carter said.

In another incident, Carter said he knew a woman who purposely threw herself down a flight of stairs and broke her femur just to get more Lortab.

To keep up with her increasing craving for Lortab, Mary would do what is referred to as "doctor shopping." At one point she was seeing 26 doctors at the same time and getting painkiller prescriptions from all of them.

At the height of her abuse, Mary said she started calling in her own Lortab prescriptions. She would call pharmacies and shuffle papers in the background to make it sound like she was calling from a doctor's office. It was a pharmacy that had caller ID however, that finally brought Mary's scam to an end.

Mary said it's not hard to scam a doctor, and some doctors agree with her.

Dr. Michael Crookston, medical director of LDS Hospital's Dayspring drug and alcohol treatment program and one of only two certified addiction psychiatrists in the state, believes doctors need to be more educated on the signs of addiction to prevent being scammed.

But Michael Ashburn, medical director of the pain program at University Hospital and the current president of the American Pain Society, said there is no significant data to show whether physicians are being used as the primary source of Lortab abuse. He said some of the abused drug is being smuggled into the United States from Mexico.

Both Ashburn and Crookston said Lortab is becoming more prevalent on the street as underground rings are developed to distribute the drug.