Did We Go Too Far With Opioids?

For years I was on morphine and oxycodone to deal with pain from a bad accident and then I had 4 toes amputated and the pain got worse…..but with all the hoopla around opioids and their control pain management became more like trying to control a five year old…..we had to bring in our meds and the nurse would count each pill to see if I had taken too many or too few….and then you would get a lecture and if you took too few they would lessen the amount with your next visit.

I was not addicted so on some occasions I would take less than prescribed by the doctor. My daily dosage was 1 morphine tablet twice a day and 1 oxycodone twice a day to fill in the gap in the morphine.

After a couple of months of being treated like a spoiled child I decided to go it without the opioids….so far it has been a struggle with the pain but I refuse to give in….

I bring my travels along the opioid trail because I thought then and now that the feds have gone too far with the opioid scare…..and I am not alone….

The stigma in America against opioid use is an understandable one, writes Ann Neumann in the Baffler. After all, the devastating toll of addiction over the last two decades by drugs such as OxyContin has been well chronicled. Neumann covers that familiar territory in her piece, but in the context of asking a larger question: Have we gone too far in curbing access in the name of safety? She suggests we have, with the result being that too many people are dying in extreme pain. “Even morphine, which has long been used to ease the final days and hours of patients in hospice care, is only available to the fortunate ones, as supply chain problems have combined with fears of overuse, leading to vast inequities as to who dies in terrible pain,” she writes.

Neuman recounts the long history of opium and its derivatives—”the most effective pain relievers known to man”—and how they have come to be demonized today, with unintended consequences. Along the way, she punctures what she calls a “myth” about the nation’s opioid epidemic, the oft-told tale of, “say, a high school athlete getting hooked on Oxy after knee surgery.” In reality, most of those who become addicted, she writes, have a prior history of drug use. “Understanding—and addressing—addiction is what’s missing from current drug policy,” she writes. A takeaway:

• “Rather than shame and blame the drugs, the drug manufacturers, or the drug users, we will see no real progress until we compassionately tackle addiction’s roots in poverty, trauma, racism, policing, and inadequate health care. A society that has seen the kind of abuse of opioids the United States has experienced, along with widespread confusion about their proper use, is a society immersed in many varieties of pain.”

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