Did the drug company deliberately mislead its clients about how addictive Oxy is or not?

And are there a lot of doctors prescribing opiates clearly against the best interests of their clients?

Unsafe product? In that it could be ground up or dissolved by people looking to abuse the drug?

Well, you do to a certain extent. Obviously there's a reasonable balance point but you can't act like more scrutiny doesn't have any real-world consequences.

Was that not a good post?

I mean goofy, that is literally what happened to my wife. She literally had multiple holes drilled into her femur and literally couldn't get pain medicine hours past when she was due after being discharged from the hospital. That was framed as NBD by zikzak. So, NBD to have that done or nah?

Basically anyone who thinks its nbd to be in agonizing pain for hours/days can eat a bowl of dicks

If his wife did in fact wait for a prolonged period you shouldn't really use this as a lolikes.

It's more that ikes has a loooooong history on this forum of getting upset when other people make arguments based on FEELS, but now that we're talking about ikes' FEELS they're very, very important and should be taken seriously.

lol you're so obviously transparent. Zikzak said it wasn't a big deal, i said why it was, you jumped in to say that was dumb and now that was proven dumb you just happened to be talking about something COMPLETELY DIFFERENT. Gmafb

Obviously. My mom had to yell at people to get pain meds for my dad when he was dying and he was in pain for months. He couldn't sleep for more than like half an hour and I spent every other night up all night with him.

That doesn't mean the drug company and irresponsible doctors haven't played a part in the epidemic which led to like 19k overdose deaths a year.

Btw this is not a feels argument only. I get heated because it hits home, but as jay said, undertreatment of pain is a big problem. Also, it's interesting to see a complete lack of any actual policy actions from people pointing to the epidemic and not much else.

Increase awareness as in vigilance using Prescription Drug Monitoring Programs, which have only recently come into wider practice, in order to limit doctor and pharmacy shopping . Nineteen states still have no requirements to query when prescribing or dispensing controlled substances.

Ikes just curios of that happened to you in Louisiana - I had a hell of a time there getting my wife a few oxy after a procedure as well, and that kind of regulation clearly isn't helping anyone. I don't think we're anywhere near a good balance of "making sure that people who need meds get them" and "denying meds to people accusing the system" but surely a better equilibrium exists.

I would agree that pill mill doctors are negligent in their ethical responsibilities (but what do you drug legalization people envision?), but I don't get vitriol being aimed at your run-of-the-mill doctor who gets deceived by abusers mimicking pain. The fraudster is clearly the morally reprehensible one.

I'm surprised we don't already have a thread for pain killing derails

No one is arguing against a part. The main driver, like every drug war problem ever, is demand. The actual contributions of the company and doctors are minuscule to compared to the that people really like getting high.

Furthermore, and most importantly, preventing overdose deaths does not require a set of stupid laws that have very little effect other than to make it much more difficult to obtain pain medication for everyone. Those laws have very little effect because, again, the demand is so high.

Actual solutions to these problems involve clean needles, decriminalization, and some sort of legalization as opposed to programs pushing these people into taking fentanyl laced heroin.

The post surgery issue wasn't even oxy. IIRC it was an extended release morphine formulation or something. It was a weird one, I don't remember exactly what it was. However, I had to literally go pharmacy to pharmacy because they were all convinced that I couldn't call to see if they had the pill or have them call another pharmacy to see if they had it. Wound up driving all over the city for hours trying to find this one damn set of pills.

For reference, my wife has had 6 hip surgeries. In her right hip, she has a special stitch holding an artificial cartilage analogue. In her left, she has 4 stitches holding another artificial cartilage analogue and a cadaveric joint capsule. She hasn't really dislocated her hips much anymore, but she regularly dislocates her shoulders and any sudden movement has a high risk of ending in severe pain.

Other problems we've had with my wife and her pain meds include:

- Being chronically undermedicated for about 9 months before we found a decent neurologist that has finally allowed her to live a somewhat normal life. Her doctor kept refusing to up her medication in spite of her reporting that she was in constant pain. I had to go to these appointments in order to have her taken seriously. This is a constant problem, women are whiny bitches to older docs.
- Monthly in person doctor visits that take 2+ hours to get a basic pain med refill
- Paper scripts only! Have to pick up scripts in person for some stupid **** reason.
- 2 failed drug tests. Yeah you get drug tested too. Beyond the absurdity of losing your pain medication if you smoke pot or something, the tests themselves are not very specific, but doctors will frequently not run confirmatory tests. We had to beg to get retested each time. The first one she tested positive for meth (I think this was cold medicine). Took a week to get re-done and negative. The second time she tested negative for opiods (don't know what that was). Both times we came super close to suddenly losing any pain control. Like 2 days of meds left and then ****ed. If the doctor's office had been *******s, she would have been blacklisted from the practice and it would have been extremely difficult to get new medications. This has happened to good friends of ours.
- Going on vacation for a week and want to fill your script in your new location? **** off. Want to pick up your script a few days early so you don't have this problem? Super **** off.
- After having 2 surgeries in 2 months, our local pharmacy labeled her a drug seeker and refused to fill scripts for her for months.
- Moving... god moving. It's ludicrously difficult to get a pain meds from new doctors even with prior established care. We're planning on having her current doctor call her new one before she goes so we can get straightened out when we move next year.

I'm sure I've missed several other problems. It's a constant worry.

She has finally gotten her pain under control with a bupernorphine patch for chronic relief and olpana for acute breakthrough. The patch provides great steady state pain control without ups and downs. The olpana bypasses the metabolism requirements of other opiods and has a much better effect for my wife. She's doing so much better.

Why is American demand uniquely high, then?

Decent question. Any theories?

I'm sure it has nothing to do with the spike in demand occurring at the exact same time OxyContin was brought to market under a fraudulent marketing campaign that grossly misrepresented its potential for abuse.

yeah man we're like crafting policy right here in the forum, amazing

IKES absolutely crushing this thread btw, some of you guys look really bad here

Minuscule or not, who knows. Heroin use has not remained constant. The growth in use has a lot of causes and people argue about apportioning blame forever and not figure it out.

But, I didn't hear zikzak suggest anything policy wise other than holding irresponsible actors responsible and you freaked out.

If this big pharma company was out lying about the effects like big tobacco did, then they should be s*** upon in the same way.

You guys are acting like there's a campaign underfoot to ban pain meds. It's really just pointing out the fraud and over-prescriptions that resulted in the current controls. You want easier access for people in genuine need? Then put some accountability on the actual pricks responsible for this epidemic.

Your pom poms aren't a good look.

There's a campaign underfoot to make getting pain meds a PITA.

And you refuse to see the people who are pretending to be in pain in order to fool others into helping them alleviate pain as the bad guys.

I understand your worldview requires a powerful corporate entity to be the villain but doctors have known what opiods are all about since the Civil War.

There can be no bad guys, just an unfortunate situation The victims can't be the bad guys even if they are responsible for it themselves.

If the big bad powerful corporation was out knowingly minimizing the addictive properties of the drug, then they are blamable for that. It's not 100% of the blame, but maybe it's legitimately $600M worth.