As someone who deals with chronic pain, I watched this situation develop: people lost access to their “safer” opioid and switch to whichever one they can get. Or suicide; there were many suicides around this time.

Thankfully opioids have never been an appropriate treatment for my pain so I didn’t have to deal with this, but I feel real empathy for the people who switched to street drugs at that time. OD is a risk but considering how consuming pain is many would probably rather be dead than experience that anyway. This is not hyperbole, on pain forums people talk about assisted suicide all the time.

We failed pain patients across the board.

It took 6 or 7 years for us even start to find therapies that work. To this day doctors have just shoveled handfuls of Gabapentin and muscle relaxers down our throats or sent us for very invasive and painful nerve blocks which both have a high complication rate and need to be repeated as frequently as every three months.

Or told us to get more exercise. I’ve always loved that one! I’ve been improving my fitness for three years, but advancement is very slow because if I go too fast it can trigger pain and be a huge setback.

Fuck the Sacklers, but fuck whoever decided that pain patients don’t deserve opioids at a rate of 100x. As is always our policy with the disabled in America, our suffering doesn’t matter anywhere near as much as the political moralization that gets people in office

Ok, I’ll get off my soapbox. This topic makes me so angry.