On the research front, a non addictive effective pain med would be a big help. And they are working on it quite a bit.
You have a good night DMK!
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Most hard drugs are insidious. However, if someone is in excruciating pain, nothing works better than an opiate. Problem is, because of all the abuse, many doctors shy away when it comes to prescribing pain meds for people who are suffering, & who have a legitimate reason to take the medication. I had some oral surgery, and all the surgeon would prescribe was Motrin. The extractions were not painful; but opening my gums & chiseling down the bone cause a good 3 days of enough pain that I couldn’t sleep. I toughed it out; but 4 or 5 days of Oxycontin would never have caused harm, or addicted me. Sitiations must be weighed logically. There is nothing a living creature will not do to get out of excruciating pain. Not fair for the innocent to suffer or go without medication because of people who abuse drugs.
This is from 2008, but I can easily imagine that the problem still exists.
I’ve also read an article about a small town that has a high number of pharmacies in a single city block…all of which sell narcotics to patients that has just visited a nearby doctor’s office (some with adjoining doors) and obtained a prescription just by saying, “I’m in pain.”
I’ll search for that story.
Here is a similar one.
What exactly do you want society to do? Teach personal responsibility? Oh wait that’s a parents responsibility.
Essentially, what you say is correct which makes it unsolvable.
Demand for drugs creates a market which is filled by people that lobby government and make payoffs to allow them to fill the demand without jail time… the ONLY thing we can do it educate people and you cannot educate a drug addict. We can lessen it over time with hard cold facts and education but until you take away the demand, you will have the financial component which makes it impossible to fix.
Yep, people become addicted to dopamine and adrenaline and the crash that follows can be pretty rough.
I can see how you would interpret it that way.
I was referencing things my brother said about med school
We will save a lot of money when schools are eliminated, since parents are completely responsible for their children’s education.
Great example of your trolling. Fine job!
Then quit whining and flag me. You call me a troll, yet you dont offer any substantial arguments against my points.
I was making a point that society shares some responsiblity to educate kids, in response to @Louman saying that parents need to teach personal responsibility. I actually agree with him, but why does no one here acknowledge that we have an education system?
Ask and ye shall receive.
Name calling at that level is prohibited by site rules.
Nothing like going to the extreme.
And your refusal to admit parents do have a role in teaching the basics of living personal responsibility in this society is why we have the problems we have today.
Blame it on some one else.
Let government teach the kiddies about personal responsibility, let the schools teach the kiddies about sex and human interaction.
After all, it takes a village.
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A public school has no business teaching morals, values or anything outside of the scope of reading, writing and arithmetic.
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From my experience with some of my friends and what I have seen and heard most of these people that become addicted started out with a bad back. Diagnosing back pain is difficult and often times leads to surgery. Up until recently back surgery meant that the patient was laid up for weeks on end after the surgery. A lot of people put off the surgery because they can’t afford to be off work.
So in most cases it works like this. The patient is prescribed Opioids for the back pain. Now they go through a series of tests to determine what the cause of the back pain is. If it comes down to surgery the patient has to decide what to do. All the while they are taking the pain medication. Most people will put off surgery as long as they can.
If they elect for the surgery after they are still taking the pain medication simply because the surgery hurts as much or more as their original back pain did. Weeks or more could have passed while all along they were taking the pain meds.
Anyone that has ever been in the hospital for a surgery knows the question that is asked many times a day for every day you are in the hospital. How is your pain? On a level of 1 to whatever please describe your pain. The doctors and nurses are required to ask the question.
If someone has a low tolerance for pain they are going to receive a higher dosage than someone that has a high tolerance for pain.
I don’t think we can put all of the blame on doctors and the pharmaceutical companies. The warnings for these medications have been out there for a very long time. Doctors are conditioned into making sure their patients are pain free. It’s their duty.
Now I do think that Doctors should warn their patients of the possibility of addiction. And I think that the patients have a duty to ask questions.
As for those selling these Opioids illegally. I have a simple solution. The death penalty. Put their asses out of our misery.
That’s going too far. There are some morals and values that must be enforced in public schools, such as honesty and civility.
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The three “Rs” are basic only…to which must be added art, music, history, language, social studies, etc…
I’m a little confused about just what this “opiod” problem is.
First of all, are we talking about people who are addicted to stuff like oxycodone, produced by pharmaceutical companies?
Second, is the problem that they get addicted because of some chronic pain treatment, and then they build up a tolerance but the doctors won’t up the dosage at some point? Then they need to buy black market opiods or get addicted to heroin?
Are these black market opiods coming from a generic producer in, say, Mexico, where there’s little control? Or are they homegrown?
It would seem that we can control domestic producers, make them account for all of the batches and flag it when truckloads go to some podunk pharmacy. Doctors prescribing the stuff can be monitored and controlled, too.
If it’s people getting a thrill, what’s the difference from heroin? They’ve never been able to control the supply of that. Are more “normal” people getting addicted because they think it’s not as bad as shooting herion into a vein? If we can’t curtail the heroin supply, curtailing oxycodone pills is pretty futile, too, if it’s lucrative and coming from foreign smugglers.
Are we trying to curtail addiction of “normal” people looking for a thrill? Just what are we trying to control here?
Personally, I used oxycodone some time ago after a surgery, and it was the most remarkable painkiller - I felt a sensation where pain would be coming from, but it didn’t register as pain. It was like the difference of feeling a shoe on my foot, and dropping a brick on my foot.
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To the bolded, that kind of thinking has gotten me labeled as a Nazi on several websites over the years.
We’re way too easy on dealers and traffickers in my opinion. If you want a law to act as an effective deterrence then you better damned well make the penalty sever enough to actually deter people from violating.