I also am a nurse and find this incredibly strange. Oxy only lasts 4-6hrs, usually it would be prescribed for 3-4 times daily dosing.
Actually the manufacturer of oxy, Purdue Pharma claimed that it was meant to last 12 hours (edit from 18). There is a
huge scandal in the US because doctors were prescribing patients on that sort of dosing schedule. But of course after taking their dose for the day patients were discovering that the oxy was wearing off only 6-8 hours after taking it.
This caused patients to take their next day dose ahead of time. Worse patients thought they were chasing "the high" (i'll come back to this) when in fact they were in pain and discomfort. Patients started taking more and more of their script which meant that they were running out well before their script ran out.
Worse when they went back to their prescribers and told them the problem, even if they were lucky enough to get another script, the patients insurance companies were refusing to pay the cost of the medicine, because the doctors prescriptions were prescribing outside of the schedule set down by the Purdue Pharma i.e. 16-18 hours. This meant people with fucked up habits, who had been taking ever increasing amounts of this really bad opiate were suddenly getting cut.
And then shit started getting even worse.
The doctors were told informally by Purdue Pharma reps to start prescribing stronger doses to compensate for the duration issue. Imagine an opiate naive individual with a legitimate injury getting prescribed strong doses of Oxycontin. This caused all manner of problems. First people were getting fucking high. I suspect large numbers of people in american who born into
stress and abuse harbour latent addictions. Prescribing that much oxy for the periods of time they were prescribed for was only going to cause these people to become addicted (i.e. suffering
opiate withdrawal syndrome), where they would get sick if they didn't dose.
Worse for many who were new to oxy and opiates and with the dismal education in drugs a lot of people were mixing these large doses of oxy with alcohol. Women, with a low body weight, couple of drinks and a large dose of oxy was all that was needed to cause people to have fatal and non-fatal overdoses.
And then of course the backlash. Instead of helping people Doctors were threaten with loss of their practices if they continued to prescribe oxy and what not. So people with chronic pain problems began to have their scripts withdrawn from. I read countless numbers of stories of prescribers forcing people to take urine drug tests and then taking away peoples pain meds when the urine tests didn't reflect that they were taking 20mg of oxy a day (seriously what the fuck. These tests aren't even design for that sort of measurement). Even those who went onto suboxone and methadone were treated this way. With doctors cutting off scripts when they discovered patients with less, supposedly, buprenorphine in their urine then expected.
OR if they had barely detectable levels of cannabis or other drugs in their system that was grounds to being kicked. The few doctors brave to prescribe Oxy were either dodgy as fuck (didn't care about patient outcomes) and charged like hell (which made the problem worse) or were so super strict they kicked people for bullshit "infractions" mainly because they had massive patient lists. People were driving for hours trying to find prescribers, waiting for hours to see them.
So of course people flooded into the black market, onto heroin and other opiates. And that's caused a new crisis. From lopamide, codeine, to strange synthetic opioids analogues of fentanyl, to of course heroin. Which caused their own waves of overdose, crime and health problems.
I have a news alert for a variety key words describing opiates. The thousands of stories being posted every day across the the planet is heart breaking. The misery is just breathtaking.
I feel like we're eating crazy pills. There are countless states and regions trying to take a stand, trying to fight the scourge of addiction and opiates. They have same emergency meetings. Police chiefs get up and talk about the signs of a user. Local health professional saying how there isn't enough rehab. People getting up and saying that we should arrest all those druggies and dealers. Others saying to follow NA. They create same task forces and nothing changes.
Every day thousands are getting busted for trafficking and possession. Nothing is changing. The drug war isn't being won. The misery of every arrest and the united states prison system is heartbreaking. But overall there is a huge amount of guilt, denial and hate mixed in with resentment and bigotry. The looking down ones nose at dirty junkies and thinking that you are better then them.
Like how rich people are just poor people with money, straight un-addicted people are just junkies without drugs. Its just heart breaking how we're utterly failing. How the same response across thousands of jurisdictions is being played out with the same predictable results. More addicts, more crime, more death and destruction.
And all because a drug company lied about how long their medication would work for.
