As a resident I encountered a book written in the 60s by the Chairman of Neurosurgery at Mass General (IIRC). As I recall the title was Pain and the Neurosurgeon. It is huge. It describes something like 400 different operations for the relief of chronic pain. Again, if you treat chronic pain with opiates you will achieve only one thing. You create a desperate addict. In a society where his addiction makes him a criminal. I disagree with the model that would insist he has a “disease”. An addict is just someone, like the rest of us, who has found a way he desires to pass his time. Most of us have goals, dreams, ambitions and so are much more resistant to the allure of simply “artificially feeling good” all the time and prefer to feel good accomplishing something. Why do we allow politicians to burden us with the exorbitant cost of criminalizing these people? Should we also criminalize people who waste their lives in mom’s basement playing vidya? Seriously. To be consistent we should criminalize anyone who is “wasting their life”, shouldn’t we? Who gets to decide? Because I can think of a bunch of people who are wasting lives. Maxine Waters. Sheila Jackson Lee. I could go on and on.
Listen, you have a background in medicine, but you aren’t giving the right definition of an addict. I’m sure you know that addiction involves obtaining a drug for euphoria and the compulsive use of the drug despite causing physical or functional harm to the individual. People with chronic pain on opiates become tolerant to opiates (withdrawal syndrome), but they use the medications for pain control, improvements in function, keeping a job etc; they do not use the medicine to get high.
But the fundamental thing we gave to keep in mind with this failed policy is that opioid prescriptions are way down, but opioid related deaths are not. We all know drug seekers are going to the street for drugs and the drugs on the street are of course less safe. I think it’s apparent that the politicians, justice, and bureaucrats are fully aware of the situation and intend on continuing and advancing this policy. I believe that they do want more deaths and drug criminals to prosecute. I seriously doubt that there will be any reduction in illicit drug activity because government derives too much benefit from the drug trade at all levels from prisons, protection rackets, money laundering.
This type of legislation proves it.