Did I get that right? If you have been on narcotics for 30+ years in a medical setting and have actually followed doctors orders 200 per cent, the opportunity for true iatrogenic addiction came and went in the early years. 30 plus years on narcotics means both that and the fact that practically every single cell in your body has been exposed to the opioid and those cells have replaced themselves three to several million times.
Addiction is the juxtaposition of an acquired metabolic and neuroendocrine condition (tolerance and physical habituation) a phobia deeper than logic about withdrawal and what happens afterwards, and the economic and legal and social impact of needing to scrape together a fix several times a day -- if the way you have to Take Care of Business to keep from being sick, or even dying if you are in poor health, is periodic doctor visits and so forth, that is not addiction. It is a habit which can bite hard, but so are other medications with physical dependence potential.
If you had trouble with alcohol, consider that alcohol and narcotics are apples and oranges, narcotics have much, much less organic damage potential than alcohol, and alcohol intoxication is harder to manage by the person involved. . People often hear about folks who drink themselves to death because of that damage, but on the other hand, there are so many reports of very productive upstanding citizens on narcotics for decades and die of old age at very old ages. There are examples of people with debilitating diseases and untreatable injuries like shrapnel in the body who started before the US Harrison Narcotic Act 1914 who lived into the XXI. Century, including a neighbour of mine when I was in the US who was still on morphine, had been so for just short of 101 years, looked younger than her years, and was actually on the same dose she had been since 1931. I had a great grandfather and grandfather who lived to 106 and 104 respectively, same thing, and their doctors and others said that a contributing factor was their prolonged, compliant, and stable use of morphine, and originally diamorphine (smack) in the case of the great grandfather, who was in continual pain following a case of tuberculosis in 1903 which settled into his spine.
I don't think the doctor is trying to enslave you or anything . . . he or she probably knows the above and may have other information like family history and cardiology workups which add up to a strong or even absolute contraindication for taking you off of the medications. What we see from what has happened in the United States of late with thug bureaucrats menacing doctors and people being cut off from medication is that pain patients with serious co-morbid or unrelated health problems can have a life expectancy on the order of weeks if that is done. to them.
Morphine used to be sold as a cure or part of a cure for alcohol habituation; in my humble opinion, oxy is an even better fit if one is going to try that.
Also if has been this long and the opioids are working for you pain wise, there is no reason whatsoever to quit them, be glad you have an educated and compassionate doctor.
Compliant patients turn into real addicts, with all the associated problems, in one case in 63 to 14 284.