I'm only thinking about this bc I just had surgery and I'm on oxy for the first time in 17 years, but, like...
Doctors really claim, like as a profession, that they just didn't know fucking opium was highly addictive and oopsie woopsie did a little fucky wucky and now like a million people are dead?
Cause I really never thought about that, but I took 1 "take 2 every four hours" pill SEVEN FUCKING HOURS AGO and I am still tripping balls and in my current altered state their cutesy little "We just forgot morphine was dangerous" shtick sounds pretty fucking ridiculous.
Oh and the DEA and FDA must have been in on this, too, right? The whole time? Because no one would actually be stupid enough to believe this shit, right?
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lot fewer people were in jail for drugs when cocaine was in every cough syrup is alls im saying
Yeah, it's very important to remember that the problem with opioid overprescription wasn't the availability of clean, pharmaceutical grade opioids. The problem was doctors, who people trusted with their lives, telling them that it was safe to take them continuously for conditions that often didn't really call for opioids.
Then the pendulum swung so hard in the other direction that a lot of people were suddenly cut off from their prescription by doctors afraid of losing their licenses. This included people who actually needed opioids to treat real painful conditions, and it also included people who didn't. But guess what? Even if these people didn't actually need their opioid prescription initially, they sure as hell needed it after taking them continuously for several months to years. To avoid withdrawals, which are essentially torture, both of those groups then had to go through the humiliating experience of convincing a skeptical doctor that they really needed painkillers. If you do this you will be treated with contempt by doctors and pharmacists who will consider you nothing but another drug seeking junkie.
The other option involves braving the illicit drug black market and the massive public health crisis that entails. That is why we have a fentanyl crisis.
Methadone clinics come so close to getting it right. People who are struggling with opioid addiction should have a clean and steady source of opioids to prevent them from using whatever dangerous shit they can find on the streets. But the rules for getting methadone replacement therapy are so harsh that it's often less of a hardship to continue using street shit. I suspect it is this way on purpose.
Every social welfare project in America has to be armored with enough crushed glass and razor wire to make sure that only the truly good, moral, decent, and godly suffering poor can access it and the regular scum who are hated by god and the market suffer.
Definitely, it's just like all of the ridiculous limitations on what foods you can buy with food stamps. People receiving methadone replacement therapy are not even allowed to use weed in weed legal states. They're drug tested regularly and a positive hit for weed or any other recreational drug (besides alcohol, surprisingly) is grounds for removal from the program. I don't understand how they came to the conclusion that's okay. Even if you accept their framing that weed is a dangerous gateway drug that will lead to relapse, in what world is taking away their methadone a solution to this? They believe your weed use has put you in danger of relapse, so they take away the primary treatment preventing you from relapsing?
Worse, they require you show up every single day to take your dose under supervision. Only after building up several months of trust will they allow you to take enough home with you for weekends, but that's it. Now, with the stigma opioid addiction carries, the opening of a methadone clinic is often met with fierce resistance from local chuds and libs alike. So you are very unlikely to live near one. The probably long commute to the clinic means this might be taking up several hours of your day every single day. If you don't have a job with flexible enough hours for this then you're just fucked, especially since this treatment is expensive, and it's likely your insurance won't cover it.
They say this is to prevent diversion and illegal sale. But the assumption that policy makers have made here is that it is preferable for someone's potentially deadly opioid addiction to go untreated than it is for someone to get high on illegally sold methadone. The priorities of this sick, twisted country, am I right?