Opioid Prescription Crisis

Aren't most opioids obtained via legitimate prescriptions?

"nobody is suggesting that opiods shouldn't be used to treat pain, are they?"Many doctors and pharmacies in the US have swung the pendulum to that end. Probably for liability reasons.

The backlash to the Oxy abuse in the US has caused doctors to swing to the other direction where they don't want to prescribe stronger pain killers or narcotics to anyone for fear of being labeled as a drug dealer. The consequences are that many people turn to other markets where fake pills laced with fentanyl are lurking. I have several friends with real chronic pain issues and they are treated like drug seekers by their physicians and have to "justify" every single pill request

recommend googling 'opioid epidemic' in which people got addicted to perfectly legal painkillers they were prescribed. yeah cartels didn't profit (at first, anyway). neither did society.

the idea is that they were falsely marketed to doctors as being non-addictive, which meant docs then prescribed them without concern for potential addiction - ie not helping the patient stop the drug, prescribing them for too long.in the UK you can buy cocodomol, which is an opioid painkiller over the counter. but it has huge text reading "no more than 3 days usage" becaues of addiction risk. it's like JJ said to docs, we got cocodomol, but you can prescribe them for months bec

You'll find some right in this threadhttps://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37544012Lots of people think non-trivial pain warrants opiods. The problem becomes who decides what counts as non-trivial pain. There was a shift in early 2000's towards "believe the patient", which caused an explosion in prescriptions pretty quickly. After all "if 5% of people after xyz surgery demand t

My impression is that this (the difficulty of getting painkillers) was mostly driven by the opioid epidemic, is that wrong?

People in physical or psychological pain deserve access to effective treatments. Outside of overdose, which is very rare if used as perscribed opioids are benign to the body compared to nicotine or alcohol. Where the problem comes from is they work so good people want more and they develop addiction and society restricts access due to moral stigma. Pharamceutical opioids perscribed by a doctor or methadone or buprenorphine maintenance is far better than using street drugs and yet access is diffi

Medication is thruroughly tested and there are plenty of good painkillers that aren't as addictive. Many are synthetic of course, and still have known side effects.The evil here isn't that the drug is addictive but that doctors and pharmaceutical companies prescribe it despite the known side effects. It's almost unheard of outside the US.

"...the problem is with impure products and people misusing / abusing them."That second part "people misusing/abusing them" is a lot bigger than you're letting on. People can get hooked on opiates easily - a quick trip to Wikipedia turns up: "Long-term opioid use occurs in about 4% of people following their use for trauma or surgery-related pain" [1]. That's a pretty big knock-on effect! If you're prescribed opiates you're rolling th