One short letter's huge impact on the opioid epidemic

[anneboleyn]

11. I can't stand the anti-opioid hysteria as we have seen the suffering of REAL patients in our own

family. People are so goddamned flippant about this issue -- is their goal to outlaw these drugs for everyone including the cancer patients or patients with severe spinal damage who simply cannot live without powerful pain medication?! Do they ANY IDEA WHAT THESE PEOPLE GO THROUGH TO GET A PRESCRIPTION EVEN WHEN THEIR CONDITION IS VISIBLE ON AN MRI?!! It makes me furious as we have had to deal with it and the ignorance from the right and left on this issue is just appalling to me as well as the "oh well, I guess your relative will just have to suffer until she dies" attitude. This country has a seriously fucked up attitude about treating patients with chronic pain. "Give her some Advil when she starts crying and moaning from bone pain." There will be mass suicides like people have never seen if legitimate pain patients are denied the drugs that WORK and are instead told to "think away the pain" and are doped out of their minds on drugs like Xanax and Lyrica (designed to treat epilepsy but now often prescribed for chronic pain since doctors are terrified about being raided by the FBI and the DEA and being shut down for prescribing opioids). Lyrica did nothing for our relative except make her legs swell severely (and the medication was stopped). Lyrica has nasty side effects and is also addictive, yet very few of these other drugs, which have become very popular in the wake of opioid hysteria, are ever even mentioned.

Even people who think other drugs should be legalized will pile on the opioid hysteria bandwagon. I hate the denial of mortality and the refusal to understand what living with chronic, severe pain is like -- 99% have no idea what that hell is like. And they also in their ignorance comment that Tylenol worked for them when "x" happened so it should work for a guy with permanent spinal damage -- to me that is as asinine and irrelevant and offensive as saying "it's god's plan" to someone whose child dies. Yeah, it won't work when bone cancer is eating your bones. I see an anti-opioids post on DU almost every day now, and/or on one of the MSM shows every night.

I can't believe that people are so indifferent to the suffering of cancer patients, children with bone cancer or other hideous disease that cause lifelong suffering, vets with hideous spinal damage, women with extremely severe endometriosis -- that they'd rather see them languish in pain so terrible they can't even scream because we need to focus entirely on abusers. Abusers can be dealt with as they deal with them in Europe. Of course it's a lot easier for the DEA and the failed war on drugs to claim a win by closing down LEGITIMATE doctors, and forcing an elderly woman dying a slow, terrible death from bone cancer to pee in a cup every single fucking month, see her doctor every month as refills are not allowed on these drugs, and still get dirty looks from pharmacy techs who think everyone on opioids is some "reefer madness" abuser.