"The other side of the opioid epidemic — we're people in severe pain"

"Opioids fill the news with a steady stream of stories of lives lost from overdose and abuse. What we rarely hear is the other side — opioids are also the most powerful pain medication we have. For me, they were life-restoring.

Appropriate pain management that included prescription opioids lifted me from the desperate circumstances of being bedridden and unable to sleep for months at a time to someone who negotiated major settlement agreements. I argued important cases in federal court, and supervised thousands of matters in U.S. Attorney’s Offices across the country...

While there is no question that looser prescribing of opioids in the 1990s and early 2000s contributed to the overdose crisis, illegal fentanyl and heroin drive overdoses today, not new prescriptions.  

The prescribing of opioids has dropped every year since 2012 and is at 10 year low — and yet drug overdose deaths have skyrocketed. Meanwhile, our public policy looks backward in time, intruding on the doctor patient relationship and burdening patient care... 

The substantial majority of people who have misused prescription opioids never received them in a healthcare setting; they obtained them from medicine cabinets, family and friends, or bought on the street."

http://thehill.com/opinion/healthcare/374246-the-other-side-of-the-opioid-epidemic-were-people-in-severe-pain

We have such a weird relationship with drugs. The differences between the way we treat caffeine, alcohol, nicotine, marijuana. The brightlines we try to draw. Because all drugs have medical benefits - even, say, nicotine which reduces anxiety and has a weird protective effect in Parkinson's. There is a reason for higher drug use among people with mental illness: at least at first, it helps. 

We would all engage with substances in a much healthier way if we approached them with nuance. 

Related: why animals take psychoactive drugs; history of drugs

FB: "There is an important but often glossed over distinction between using medication for a health condition in a way that restores function, enabling work and participation in family life, and misusing a substance in a manner that destroys function."