“Targeting legal prescriptions is thus unlikely to reduce overdose deaths, but it may increase them by driving more users to illegal sources.”
Yep. (Over)Regulation is not the answer.
Ha! Great post. Confirms exactly as I had long suspected.
Well, you see, us swamp creatures get better bribes from the illegals.
May be of interest:
Oxycontin tweak helped turned addicts to heroin.
Link: https://pjmedia.com/news-and-politics/oxycontin-tweak-helped-turn-addicts-heroin/
My wife is a pharmacist and says the legal supply of fentanyl is so tight that she can’t get any for the hospital she works in.
That’s liberal thinking for you. They believe that cracking down of the legitimate and legal supply of fentanyl will suddenly make the illegal supply disappear. It’s worked so well for drugs that they want to apply it to guns.
The conflation of these fatality statistics is intentional to increase the scope of government.
This is well-known, but the Great War on Drugs is as unstoppable as a military entanglement in the Middle East. Taking pain medicine away from those who are suffering is not tantamount to torture; it is torture. If you did this to a prisoner of war, you’d be in violation of the Geneva Conventions. I pray everyone involved in this scurrilous deception is stricken with a chronic illness that leaves them writhing in pain for the rest of their miserable lives.
If an oncologist prescribes pain killers and the Feds don't like it, they can break that doctor, take aways his livelihood, and even imprison him.
It's not the job of the Federal government to decide who gets pain pills, and how many they are allowed. That is a private decision between doctor and patient.
And yet we always hear how abortion (i.e. infanticide) is "a private decision" between a woman and her doctor. Evidently just like with humans, to the Federal government, some "private decisions" are more equal than others.
A good friend of mine died last year. I helped his wife go through all his stuff after he died. He had many medical ills and had been prescribed opioids which he hardly took. While cleaning out his medical supplies we found probably over 1,000 pills. I said, “We have to destroy these.” She agreed. So, we put them all in a bucket, crushed them as best we could, and then poured motor oil over them and put them in a sealed container and put them in the trash. I told her that we could not trust handing them over to any entity for fear that they would be sold on the street. We did not flush them down the toilet.
Zactly.
Those morons are hurting people with legitimate pain, who are looking for relief.
If people want to off themselves with illicit drugs, let em...
I think this “opioid crisis” is just pretense to legalize weed.
Nor will I ask for anything more than what I'm given for my upcoming procedure which the surgeon has warned me will be quite difficult.
As I said...China...Mexico...and weak,stupid people.
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I’ve been shouting this since the beginning.
Kind of like that wildly successful prohibition thingy?
Being a Freeper with a chronic pain condition, I can say that those who are legally prescribed opioids are having their dosages altered with no change in symptoms, some only receive one week of pills at a time, some are being denied pills by the pharmacy because they are only allowed to dispense a certain # of pills per week. These changes, as irrational as they are, are made even more irrational because they are totally random.
People who live in pain are under much stress wondering whether the next time they go to pain management their script/dosage will be changed. Pain management offices are printing new contracts for patients to sign.
A woman in my support group had her meds cut in half. The reasoning was that the dr would lose his license if he didn’t. What we have has no cure. RSD/CRPS. It also has no standardized treatment. These random rule changes are cruel and unusual treatment that they wouldn’t do to an overdosing addict.
What other meds that are legally prescribed impacted by the way they are abused by addicts?
This was addressed somewhat by an earlier post:
http://www.freerepublic.com/focus/f-bloggers/3647886/posts
and I applied my own colorful commentary there:
"But the takeaway from MOTUS should be a very Conservative reaction:
Question EVERYTHING the government says, especially when special interests are driving things. It will take generations for the damage wrought over the past 70 years to be reversed...if action began TODAY.
But the problem governs not government action. Nor the medical community. It governs personal responsibility. I fault everyone suffering from this so-called “opioid epidemic” for their own poor choices. That includes not asking “why” they have the pain in the first place. Who the hell actually trusts their doctor implicitly? That’s as crazy as “settled science.”
Sadly, I doubt I will live to see a medical name applied to the condition from which I recovered and which I believe afflicts 2/3 of the country, as this “climate change” debate is a red flag for the state of science...applicable to all areas, not just health."
It's a lot more complicated than MOTUS describes, but at its core it's a lucid analysis.
I greatly appreciate this thread. I have been dealing with chronic pain for 12 years due to a collision. I was on fentanyl for about 18 months until my last surgery 11 months ago. The surgery helped. I had no issues at all ceasing the fentanyl tho I am still on other milder opiods. It is an embarrassment to admit these days to be taking these medications, especially when I was on the fentanyl patches and people would ask what they were. But, without them I would be in debilitating pain despite 3 surgeries to alleviate damage. I still have days I can’t get off the couch, cook supper for my beloved husband or play with my grandbabies but thanks to modern medicine most days I function well enough to do those things. I have found many natural products and therapies that help but when it comes down to brass tacks, I am mobile thanks to a fabulous spinal pain management specialist who can still prescribe opiods. Us baby boomers are worn out and many of us have aging bodies that give constant pain and yet we are a generation which has embraced life. We don’t want to stop enjoying life because the blasted gubmint leaves us in pain!
Thank you for posting this article. It did me good to read and I’m also relieved to see so many of my fellow FRiends understanding comments.