Can we discuss, I don't know,
the actual topic? I think I know four people who need to smoke less weed, or more weed. Either way figure it out for yourselves.
Great, now doctors can add a congressional witch hunt to the list of reasons not to prescribe medicine to legitimate pain patients.
Aaaaaand... this. The unfortunate fact about painkillers is that treating pain is really, really hard, and not treating pain is really, really terrible. Cannabis will probably make this a little easier, maybe a lot easier, but there are some things that even cannabis + NSAID won't really suppress effectively.
At the end of the day we will eventually need new drugs, pentazocine and tramadol are promising avenues, but there are of course plenty of people with chronic pain who hate these two because they unfortunately still aren't as effective as opioids. There are the cases where traditional painkillers may not always be the right thing (fibromyalgia, chronic septic lower back pain). You might be thinking that combinations would help, but pentazocine + cannabis is already basically psychedelic, not a great side effect for pain management IMO.
It can be terrible when doctors won't prescribe opioids to people with a history of abuse who nonetheless are in very real pain. To interpret it bluntly: that some doctors overprescribe and other doctors take it upon themselves to overcompensate. In my unqualified opinion prescribing medication to an addict is not really a problem even if they are drug-seeking, it's when medication is prescribed to people who go on to redistribute it that can create new addicts, it's a bit callous to treat existing addicts as lost causes, but, statistically, they are.
Of course, one has to wonder: why is the prescription painkiller problem worse in the US than anywhere else? We're not, overall, older, dumber, fatter, or more prone to chronic pain than Europeans. So what are we doing wrong that they do right?
I think really it might not be a terrible idea to be a little more lax with prescriptions through official channels such as hospitals, the thing is that the extreme difficulty of obtaining drugs from legitimate sources is what creates the market vacuum that "pill mills" operate in, and let me be clear: for all the illicit customers of pill mills there are almost surely people with very real chronic pain who get medicine from these doctors, and when their supply is cut off it isn't good for them, they're innocent people and they get thrown under the bus in all of this hysteria.
If well-intentioned doctors would prescribe effective medicines it would be easier to identify pill mills because they would actually get fewer legitimate patients, so they become statistically more obvious. Thus the media scare and government crackdown on the painkiller phenomenon can actually help it to continue and creates loads of collateral damage. In Europe, I'm guessing -- mind you I admit to guessing -- it's actually easier to get a prescription from a real hospital.
Alcohol cointoxication is the undiscussed elephant in the room in overdose, of course, way too many, IIRC a majority, of these overdoses are created by combining the drug with alcohol, and perhaps this piece of advice should be given more readily to people on painkillers: stop drinking. Just stop -fucking- drinking. If it were socially normative to never, ever drink when taking prescription painkillers we could probably save thousands of lives without changing anything else. This is one case where legal recreational marijuana would probably be extremely convenient.
So how does the epidemic stack up against alcoholism?
It's basically a rash of armed robberies of Jewish businesses in Switzerland in 1937, by comparison.
