LOS ANGELES — Life is back on track for 21-year-old Ian Weiss, who is now in his third year of recovery from his opioid addiction. Before his freshman year of high school, Weiss said a sleep-away camp accident where he injured his leg playing soccer near his tent’s platform gave him his first taste of painkillers.

“My leg went through one of the slats and in that process I sheared the skin off my muscle, on my right thigh,” Weiss said.

Now, Weiss is left with a physical scar on his thigh. But his internal struggle with addiction began just one year after the injury. He said he would then seek out other painkillers without a prescription, like OxyContin from his parent’s medicine cabinet and eventually fentanyl.

“That’s really where, I think, it started to go really bad because with OxyContin I could take a pill or take two pills and just sit and stare at my wall for eight or nine hours. At the time, I learned to be comfortable with that. That’s all I wanted to do,” he said.

According to a Stanford-Lancet Commission on the North American Opioid Crisis report, OxyContin, a controlled release form of oxycodone, was approved by the FDA and marketed to doctors in the mid-90s. It also links the drug to the opioid crisis.

Now, the Supreme Court is weighing whether a $6 billion national bankruptcy settlement that would dissolve OxyContin’s maker Purdue Pharma, fund drug treatment programs and shield the Sackler family behind the company from further lawsuits, would be enough.

Remy Olivier, program director and co-founder of Annandale Behavioral Health, a six-bed substance abuse treatment center, said the funds are needed to combat the latest wave of opioids — fentanyl.

“We still have this epidemic. People still need help and finding treatment is still very challenging. Either someone has Medi-Cal here in California and there is an extreme shortage of beds or they have private insurance. But not everybody has that,” Olivier said.

In 2022, about 7,000 Californians died from an opioid-related overdose. Fentanyl was reported in 87% of those deaths, according to the California Department of Public Health.

 Weiss said he was lucky to break free from his addiction, but it’s a battle he still faces to this day.

“The thought is always there, but as years go by and days go by, it gets farther and farther away from me,” he said.