States used to blame today's bans on the pill mill problem that was addressed over 20 years ago - but now don't even bother to do that. Now the argument reads like 'because fentanyl exists, you must live the rest of your life in pain'.
To make matters worse, the opioid epidemic is real; regardless of the cause, it’s not just war on drugs hysteria.
It ends up that opioids are terrible drugs. Aside from the obvious habit forming stuff, there’s things like hyperalgesia and central sensitization — long-term opioid use can screw up how your brain processes pain.
I witnessed the decline of opioids in the latter-half of the 2010s firsthand from the patient’s perspective. The response to these problems from the medical community was _sheer panic_. No one was concerned with “what are we going to do next”, it was just “we have to get these patients off of opioids”. Lots of people suffered. There were suicides. There were, as you mentioned, people who moved to street opioids. The whole thing was a fucking travesty.
Rolling up on a decade we’re just finally _starting_ to get a handle on this thing with responsible alternatives for pain management. The stench lingers; I think we will look back on this era with a similar lens to how we see surgeries before the work of Joseph Lister.
Opioids ruin lives. Opioids restore lives. People die from taking them. People are functionally dead when they're unobtainable.
The most false thing about opioids is that they are any one thing.
I've used hydrocodone for months at a time. It's addictive so there are protocols that need to be followed. Stick with the dose and taper when done. However, that was in the past. For severe pain, legal pain relief is no longer available - to me and to millions of others.
My state now has a hard 3 day limit and few Dr.s are willing to write even that. What has become routine everywhere is being Rx'd Tylenol for moderate to severe post-op surgical pain. I personally had to beg for tramadol following abdominal surgery. I recently had to enter into a protracted negotiation with my Dr - again, for tramadol - so I could exercise and get a little more life out of my failing knees.
The pendulum has swung way too far and the number of lives that are being ruined by that is nearly incalculable.
That’s fair. A better way to say what I mean might be “our opioid therapy protocols aren’t very good” or “we’ve relied on opioids in ways that cause more harm than good”.
There are situations where opioids are the obvious right answer. I have a similar anecdote, having to beg for an opioid refill when I was suffering from post-op pain.
While I admit I don’t know the details, I wonder if your knee pain is one of those situations where opioids aren’t close to an ideal solution, but we never actually developed an ideal solution because it was easier to throw opioids at every pain problem. Now opioids are no longer allowed and you get to replace opioids with nothing.
I don’t mean to de-anonymize you, but what state is this? I know state laws vary, but I haven’t heard of anything close to those sorts of restrictions.
Eventually found LDN and that stopped the pain.