Comment by refurb | Hacker News Reader

Comment by refurb | Hacker News Reader

"Time is a flat circle. Everything we have done or will do we will do over and over and over again- forever."

For those of you who were around in the late 80's early 90's. Today's moral panic about opioids will give you a chuckle.

Back in the 1980's opioids were the devil and many patients, even in hospice, had undertreated pain due to fear of addiction.

In the 1990's it dawned on doctors that maybe they should be a little more aggressive in treating pain. It made sense. Pain can slow recovery as it can leave patients immobile. In addition, it's criminal to have someone suffer in pain when you can prevent it.

So doctor's prescribed more and things worked out fine. Then they went to far and prescribed heavy narcotics where they weren't really needed. In addition, the public mood shifted towards opioids (as it had shifted towards cocaine in the 1980's). Who needs to buy heroin when you can do a doc to write you a script for 100 80mg Oxycotin?

So the crackdown begins. We have hospitals stating they won't give out anything more than Tylenol or Ibuprofen.

I predict in the next decade we'll start the whole process all over again. Patients in desperate pain won't be adequately treated. There will be a public outcry and opioids will become "tools that can be appropriately use for all types of pain."

I think calling current thoughts around opioids a "moral panic" is ridiculous.

Much of today's response to opioids is an actual panic given that there is a real, ongoing epidemic of opioid abuse that is killing tens of thousands of people. The number of deaths by opioids more than doubled in 2016 compared to 2015.

I was around in the 80s, and this isn't just some "cyclical response". Take a look at any of graphs of opioid deaths or overdoses - there is no cycle, just something that is shooting up and up and up.

Sorry, it's a moral panic.

When I read comments like "just one Vicodin and you're addicted for life!", "nobody should take opioids" and "opioids are destroying our country" it's moral panic.

As for the number of overdose deaths, take a look at other countries that never saw the massive overprescribing of opioids like Canada. The deaths are due to synthetic opioids mostly coming from China.

I'd say it's a moral panic. The response to this very real epidemic of deaths seems to be to moralize about opioids rather than to look for ways to reduce deaths from opioid use. Thus this is a moral panic as much as it is a health issue.

In much of the conservative south, the stigma surrounding opioids never left, and economically underprivileged people have been suffering ever since.

Over the past decade, one of my longer-haired male family members has on separate occasions been forced to endure sizable fractures and even orthopedic debridement without analgesics.

The greatest irony is that tightened controls only seem to exacerbate substance abuse in communities with epidemic problems.

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