incidentally related opinion piece in Undark on the opioid epidemic: We’re Waging the Wrong Battle Against Opioids.
• End incarceration for illicit possession of opioids or drug-use equipment intended for personal use, including for pregnant women. Incarceration of people who have opioid addictions raises the risk that they will die of overdoses.
i am glad to see a more mainstream shift to decriminalization of drugs beyond marijuana, because weirdly enough the extremely negative consequences of jailing people for drug use don’t stop existing because the drug in question isn’t marijuana!
One thing I find particularly bothersome and troubling about how we’ve been dealing with opioids is the shift to make it tougher and tougher to get them. In order to treat some chronic pain I have that has developed over the past several years I’ve turned to drugs which diminish pain of various sorts: dissociatives, opioids, marijuana, etc.; as well as drugs which can help keep my mind off pain. However, I only recently pursued a small script for opioid pain meds (5 vicodin per month) to be used when I do activities which I often pursue such as hiking and dancing which really aggravate my pain.
Going through this process has been revealing in even more ways than I previously understood. For one, they wanted to drug test me to get access to opioids, as in if my use of other drugs wouldn’t be an indicator that perhaps my pain wasn’t being managed by medicine or that other drug use couldn’t be minimized by being treated appropriately. It is also interesting to me that if I had failed a drug test, what recourse would I have for chronic pain? I could certainly walk a few blocks from my house and purchase some fentanyl on the street, but maybe that’s at least part of why we have such a crisis right now? After getting my prescription the first time I went to get it refilled it was denied by my insurance carrier - apparently they need the doctor, which prescribed it, to also sign off, AGAIN on any more than 7 pills in any 90 day period. There’s an absurd amount of gatekeeping to get access in the first place.
However, now that I do have access and have been taking the medication I find it interesting that they have made zero effort to schedule any follow-up appointments and zero effort to ask me how I’m handling the drug. I do not think I’ll ever get addicted to opioids as I have no desire to use it repeatedly and recreationally, but they seemed a lot more interested in stopping me from getting access than from checking whether I could use the drugs appropriately or had any issues with following the prescription or moderating my usage. While it had been clear to me from the beginning that gatekeeping was the route the industry had been pushing towards for quite some time (I work in healthcare and am aware of some the legislation and policy which has significantly minimized which providers have authorization to prescribe opioids in the first place and how control over prescription strength, renewal, etc. has been clamped down upon as well), I was unaware how bad the gatekeeping had progressed in recent years despite the increasing toll it’s had on American society.
I’m still quite convinced that more transparency, rather than more gatekeeping, is the appropriate route forward. People who want the drug will find access to the drug, full stop. By making it harder for people to acquire the drug through legal means you merely push people to buying the drug on the street and eliminate any possibility for medical intervention. We need to open doors and encourage conversation rather than shutting them, locking them, and throwing people in jail when they seek what they want elsewhere.
speak of the devil: NEW YORK (AP) — Justice Department signals it might be willing to allow safe injection sites for people to use heroin and other drugs.
full article and details here: Justice Dept. signals it may allow safe injection sites
Opioid crisis? You mean the one that the DEA created?
Let me tell you a story. A couple of decades ago, a pharmaceutical company invented a new opioid drug that they hoped (at the time, at least) was a way to make a powerful pain medicine less addictive. It was formulated such that people didn’t get an instant buzz off of it, a so-called slow-release design. It became popular, and as it became more popular those who use drugs recreationally learned to subvert the slow-release design.
Then it became immensely popular.
The DEA is a bizarre government agency which, by law, isn’t allowed to question its own purpose. But that makes sense right? If you were to create a government agency to go stomp on babies’ heads, you wouldn’t want them sitting around mulling over whether murdering infants was a bad thing. You’d make a rule that says they can’t ever hire anyone who has ever showed any inclination towards or sympathy for the idea that babies shouldn’t have their skulls crushed with jackboots. If you didn’t make such a rule, how would your bureau even last a year?
The DEA then shuts down so-called “pill mills” under the theory that they’re helping people. These people are addicts, and (if you believe the propaganda) would do literally anything to get their next fix. Only they can’t get their fix with oxycontin anymore, so they have to find a substitute.
This substitute was dirty street heroin laced with (and fuck, I wish I wasn’t make this up) elephant tranquilizer. Shit so potent that if the greasy-haired shitweasel dealer gets a tenth of a drop more of the stuff in the talcum power he claims is heroin, people will die. Like, don’t collect $200, go directly to the morgue dead. But they’re addicts, and this is the only remaining substitute.
So these people are using this as a substitute for the pharmaceutical grade, measured dose, regulated by the FDA and supervised by trained pharmaceutical engineers drug that they used to use. The drug that no one ever died of an overdose from (excepting intentional suicides).
And if you think I’m exaggerating here, let’s look at a quote from the link:
The report, two years in the making, calls for immediate action to quell the rising tide of addiction and overdose deaths in the United States and Canada,
What comes first in their list? Are they concerned about “overdose deaths”? No. The first item in their list is… “addiction”. That’s the real problem, you see. Not “deaths”. Sure, they’ll get around to solving those too, eventually, as soon as they deal with the real priority, the “addictions”. Because it’d be better for people to be dead than addicts. If all the addicts die, hell, that actually solves the addiction problem. So rather than a list of priorities, this is closer to a “problem and solution” list.
“Unrestrained profit-seeking and regulatory failure instigated the opioid crisis 25 years ago, and since then, little has been done to stop it,”
I don’t even know what to say to this shit. More than a thousand deaths per week… but those deaths didn’t start 25 years ago. They started once Purdue Pharma was demonized and the DEA cracked down on pill mills.
We now live in a world where grandmas dying of bone cancer suffer their last few weeks of life on Earth in agony because their pain doctors are either too brainwashed to understand that there are superior alternatives to scrip-strength tylenol or too in fear of being prosecuted for overprescribing.
And that happens because people like yourself read horseshit like this link and believe it.
Hey there, since you’re new to Beehaw, I’d like to remind you of our core principle of being nice. This post feels both aggressive and accusatory and doesn’t particularly strike me as nice. You’ve jumped to a few conclusions about what I think and stances that I hold which are simply incorrect, and in the future I’d appreciate if you asked me for clarification.
I don’t even know what to say to this shit. More than a thousand deaths per week… but those deaths didn’t start 25 years ago. They started once Purdue Pharma was demonized and the DEA cracked down on pill mills.
there are probably more things factually wrong with your post here than this, but “Purdue Pharma was demonized” is the most egregious one to me. it’s not really in question that Purdue played a major role in the first wave of opioid deaths through its mass marketing of opioids, lies about the addictive nature of the opioids they produced–particularly Oxycontin–and generally callous and dismissive nature of what they were doing despite knowing the damage they were causing. the most i think you can say is they simply haven’t been as disproportionately responsible for subsequent waves of opioid addiction–but they in large part kicked off what we now consider the opioid epidemic, and i think doing anything but raking them for that is basically malpractice.