Little Mini-rant on prescription painkillers...

[jwirr]

48. We are also working on ending or slowing down the illegal sales as well

but what is the use if you are not working to stop both. Why would DEA think it is worth stopping illegal sources when doctors are giving them out to anyone who asks ? I do not know where you live but in my area doctors are the main source of opioids. And we have children dying from it.

I have one grandson in treatment right now and thankfully he is not trying to score from anyone. But when he broke his hip in 7 places we told the doctor about his addiction. The stupid doctor gave him the exact drug he was addicted to and then continued to give it to him for another 2 years.

Right at the moment one of the things we need is communication between doctors and treatment centers because the most common treatment there is methadone and it reacts with other pain medications in such a way that it becomes fatal. Yet the doctors in general practice and the treatment centers are forbidden by law from disclosing information to each other. This puts both the patient and the doctors in danger. I also indicated that I have no problem with end of life medications and what I am lobbying about has nothing to do with that. I am trying to make our treatment programs more effective.

Your last sentence is correct some doctors do not pay attention to patients with pain. The patient needs to find a doctor who does. As I noted above my SIL has had chronic pain since the 80s. He goes to regular doctors and pain specialists and has no trouble getting what he needs. Nor do I for my own back pain. BUT we do not go to the ER. We also do not shop around from doctor to doctor.

What the current laws are doing is making the treatment center useless and an actual part of the system to make opioids available to their clients. And at this point opioids are not even on the Prescription Drug Monitoring Program in many states. So what you are saying is that we should just keep spending money on a program that serves only one purpose - to make the pharmaceutical industry richer.

There are two things we are asking for: (1)To allow Medication-Assisted Treatment programs to communicate with doctors to avoid medical interaction problems as much as possible. (2) To include all dangerous drugs like opioids to be included on PDMPs.

That needs to be done to improve our treatment systems and to stop killing our children. I see nothing wrong with that. I do think ignoring the problem is very dangerous.