The CDC can suck my ass
For friends not in the spoonie community, this is about the CDC’s recent guidelines that attempt to combat drug addiction in America by severely restricting access to opioid medications for ALL patients except for terminal cancer patients.
Without opioid pain medications, I would have had to quit working and go on disability nine years before I did.
Without opioid pain medications I would have been housebound and dependent on caregivers for another 10 years after that.
Without opioid pain medications I will be less active, more sedentary, and more sick.
The CDC says opioids don’t work for chronic pain; they’re wrong. They don’t work for some chronic pain. They don’t cure chronic pain. But they make life liveable for millions of chronic pain patients. Estimates of chronic pain sufferers in America range from a low of 39 million to a high of 110 million. That low-water mark excluded people with intermittent chronic pain, like endometriosis or migraine, as well as omitting people with neurogenic pain. Most reasonable guesses put the number at 70–80 million.
The cure for drug abuse and addiction has nothing to do with restricting pain patients’ access to medication, or forcing them to give up what quality of life they have managed to attain through having their pain managed with medication.
It’s not about labeling pain patients as addicts for taking medication to which they can build a physical dependence. (By that definition, every time I go on prednisone and have to taper off it, I’m a prednisone addict!)
It’s not about calling a patient in chronic pain asking their doctor for relief a drug-seeker.
The cure lies in combating the issues that lead to drug abuse, like poverty and an economy that sees the rich getting richer while the poor and middle class fall further and further behind. It lies in giving hope to people in hopeless situations. Not taking hope away from several million more.
Reblog to educate the normals. We need a cultural perception shift, and it needs to start now.
I make a hobby of watching documentaries about heroin (don’t ask) and all of them in recent years have a terrifying but obvious agenda: opioid pain reliever restriction.
They harp on the fact that a high percentage of heroin addicts began by taking prescription painkillers, but they never bring up how many prescription painkiller users become heroin users. Every time I watch one, they get to the part where addicts (current and recovering) talk about how they started on oxy/vic/perc after an injury and eventually moved to heroin, almost universally it’s because the pills got too hard to get, and I get irritated. Usually the pills are blamed for the transition to heroin, despite the fact that earlier in the documentaries the same individuals often speak about prior addictive behavior with pot and alcohol. (Very rarely is Purdue Pharma’s incredibly troubling insistence on misprescription addressed – and when it is, it too includes the “pain pills to heroin” narrative.)
Quick Google stats: there were 259 million painkiller prescriptions written in 2012. That same year heroin use was estimated at 2 people per 1000, meaning with a population of 314 million and given a likelihood of under-reporting, we had roughly 6-700 thousand heroin addicts in the US. At most, a million.
So even if many of those prescriptions were for the same people, and even if every single heroin addict was the direct result of a pain pill prescription (not super duper likely), the vast majority of people who got prescription painkillers somehow, magically, didn’t become addicted to heroin.
It’s almost like addiction involves multiple emotional, physical, genetic, and environmental factors that have nothing to do with prescription pain relief but opioids are an easy scapegoat for grieving families to pin their pain to.
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Mooncustafer 