Frog Applause by Teresa Burritt for December 28, 2018

Prescription opiates/opioids are involved in overdoses and abuse. That doesn’t mean they shouldn’t be prescribed and used for their intended purpose. Insufficiently treated intractable pain is also debilitating and deadly.

Currently, non-prescription opioids (heroin and illicitly manufactured fentanyl) are involved in more overdose deaths than prescription opioids.

https://www.cdc.gov/drugoverdose/epidemic/index.html

This was in the making for years. The amphetamine and valium craze has happened. Diet pills and nervous tension fixed with easy to get medicine. Methadone is an older taper drug, used in hard addiction cases. I MYSELF WOULD SEEK OUT METHADONE.

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This probably isn’t what Max Planck had in mind.

Even medical personnel with the best intentions are screwed by regulations meant to “avoid abuse.” Ten years ago, I had to go to the ER because of a kidney stone. The pain was like nothing I’d imagined—a nurse later told me that only childbirth would be more painful. A doctor gave me an injection of Demerol. It didn’t work. After a few minutes of me gasping in pain, he gave me a shot of Dilaudil. It worked, and I let out a huge sigh of relief as the pain ended. He left the room to do some paperwork, because anyone who needs a stronger-than-ordinary painkiller might be a junkie looking for a fix.

Fortunately he didn’t dawdle, because after I let out that sigh of relief, I forgot to inhale. The Dilaudil had stopped my breathing, and when he came back in the room I was lying on the floor, unconscious (they said). They tell me I’d turned blue before they could get me breathing again. I spent the next twenty-four hours in ICU until they were sure my breathing reflexes were working again. But some well-paid bureaucrat got a form assuring him that the ER was on the lookout for evil drug addicts.

Smiles on their lips and pain in their eyes. Same ole same ole.

Thanks for this. I have the same Voodoo wish but I would include a special doll for each legislator involved with these rules and put them at the top of the list. They’ll be the first in line screaming for the pills if anything happens to them.

Sleep is my drug, my bed is my dealer and my alarm clock is the police..

It is a terrible thing when the government, an insurance carrier or some other bureaucracy injects itself into the doctor/patient relationship. My 93 y.o. dad struggles along with the pain of 2 failed hip replacement surgeries. It’s hard to watch. Thank you, Tee, for using your platform to offer a reality-based perspective rather than one based on politics or perceived social stigma.

P.P.S. to Tee – Since I am you (or are you me?), I guess fixing your link is what one could call self-editization?

I am a neuroscientist working in research since since 1970. Even back then, we in research knew that the criminalization of drugs was counter-productive, helping neither those who really need the drug (and if you’re in intractable pain, you DON’T get addicted by any real measure) nor those who are actually addicted. Addiction has to do with the modification of neuroreceptors, and, if we were really more serious about handling addiction vs. pain management, we’d be putting more money into that kind of research. Yes, it’s difficult research, but it can be done. We have finally in the last few years gotten a structure of sorts of the opiate receptor (the abstract of a review by a colleague of mine is here: http://dx.doi.org/10.1124/mol.112.083279).

I had horrible, debilitating migraines (is there any other kind?) for many years. Had it not been for opiates, I would have committed suicide to escape the pain.

The human condition … we may appear to be wandering in the wilderness, but all is not lost … except for the damned keys …!

Teresa, if you did decide to go into the Voodoo Doll business, I’ve no doubt business would be brisk.

Ms. T, you’re the best. Always have been. Now sit down and take your compliment, and don’t give me that look. :)

I will never forget the last time I saw my uncle Ray, a WWII Navy Seabee veteran, dying of leukemia, back in the 1950s. He had been reduced to a writhing 85-pound victim, begging from his hospital bed for any of us, please, to kill him. His pain was agonizing, as the allowable amount of morphine no longer had any palliative effect. Not long after that day, he died of “natural” causes.

My own experience is more limited. I’ve done the kidney stone thing; I survived a very acute appendicitis; but what I recall most vividly is awakening from the dentist’s sedative after the extraction of two “wisdom teeth,” screaming in pain. I took a while to settle down before I could be driven home….

Sadly this is nothing more than a typical government overreaction to its own failure.

We’ve had decades to find solutions but instead we knee-jerk.

I myself again know something of the turning away. It is a two edge sword…

Are Pharmaceutical Companies to Blame for the Opioid … – The Atlantic

https://www.theatlantic.com/business/archive/…/lawsuit…companies-opioids/529020/

Jun 2, 2017 – In 2012, there were 793 million doses of opioids prescribed in the state, enough to supply … State attorneys general had sued tobacco companies, arguing that the companies should take up …. (Three executives also pled guilty to criminal charges.) … Doctors were too loose with their prescribing practices.How the American opiate epidemic was started by one pharmaceutical …

https://theweek.com/…/how-american-opiate-epidemic-started-by-pharmaceutical-com…

Mar 4, 2015 – By then the potent opioid accounted for about 30 percent of the … Like other pharmaceutical companies, Purdue likely sought to … The Purdue Frederick Company, Inc., Purdue and its top executives pleaded guilty to charges that it misled

Trump’s True Colors: Build a Wall or Confront the Opioid Epidemic

They look like LDS members.