Vietnam veteran denied pain pills after testing positive for marijuana
If this is how we treat our troops, you’d think that the “Support Our Troops” crowd would want to end the war on drugs.
Unfortunately, speaking as someone on probably very similar medications – I have permanent spinal damage due to having had a tumor removed from my spine – this has less to do with ‘not supporting our troops’ than it very MUCH has to do with ‘illogical and scare-mongering tactics as regards pain medication.’
Doctors who do pain management are REQUIRED to pee-test or blood test their patients (I get tested every time I go in for a refill, so about once every eight weeks), required to keep logs, etc. The alternative is getting shut down for running a “pill farm.”
This is all directly attributable to the scare tactics in which the public believes that o noes oxycontin/oxycodone/etc. gotten from doctors is where pill habits come from! Your pill problem comes from a legit prescription! – and that’s just not the case.
This is a) utterly shameful and b) completely tied to the shit-ass, scare-mongering way in which we handle pain meds. I get treated like a criminal every time I go in to CVS to refill my meds, especially if my favorite pharmacy tech isn’t there. It’s common knowledge among spoonies you avoid ERs no matter how bad you hurt, unless you have a letter from your pain management doctor telling them to contact the doc, because they’ll treat you like a drug seeker. You go to the same pharmacy, and find a ‘good and sympathetic one’ or someone might decide you’re trying to get pills you don’t ‘deserve’ and flag your profile in your state’s pill-monitoring software, and then suddenly, magically, every pharmacy will start telling you that they’re “out of stock.”
It’s absolutely horrible, and what’s happened to this man is totally unconscionable. Don’t think it doesn’t happen to pain patients every. single. day.
Because it does.
Except it’s important to note that not everybody who is on pain meds needs them or uses them correctly. There IS rampant abuse of prescription pain pills. It’s absurd because there ARE places that prescribe pain pills indiscriminately. The VA by my home is under investigation after prescription drug abuse issues because of irresponsibly prescribing them. People have died because of it.
And where do you think people who can’t afford or get access to the pills they are addicted to? Do you know what somebody going through that withdrawal is going through? It’s fucking agonizing. It’s monstrous.
Alternatives to that level of suffering present themselves in buying the pain pills off the street or turning to abusing other similar drugs like… You guessed it! Heroin!
The amount of OD’s on pain pills is staggering.
I think that this is less fear-mongering than you may think and more of a misguided attempt at managing pain pill abuse.
Which is all the more reason to legalize marijuana and to start treating addicts like human beings. Start cracking down on dealers of pain pills and heroin instead of casual pot smokers.
I’m sorry you’ve been treated this way and feel this way, but it isn’t just a fear mongering tactic, it isn’t just a way of guilting people. It’s a method of keeping drug abuse in check, which is unfortunately not effective and is misguided because of he society we live in.
Yes, I know what withdrawal is. When I miss my medication I go into withdrawal pretty quickly. I’ve had family members nurse me through withdrawal more than once – the worst was when I was in another state for my grandmother’s funeral & our flight got delayed more than the extra medicine I carried on me, because of course I didn’t carry more than an extra day since I was afraid of my bag/pills being stolen. Why was I afraid? Because then I couldn’t get them replaced due to the policies that we’re discussing. If someone stole my bag, or it was lost (and my son’s Kindle was stolen on that trip) then I’d be shit out of luck. And of course when I called my doctor’s office they were very sorry but he isn’t licensed in that other state and so they told me to ‘take Aleve and pray.’ Really.
So yes, I know what withdrawal is. I went through it while on a cross-continental airplane flight, trying very hard to look ‘normal’ while I went through airport security. I went through it while my husband was driving me home.
I’m also aware that abrupt withdrawal from the psychiatric medications that are often prescribed in lieu of opiates is actually much, much worse in many cases – and far, far more dangerous.* No one seems to want to talk about the fact that you cannot simply abruptly stop any medication that you take on the regular, or that the effects of, say, someone stopping taking their diabetes or anxiety or depression or heart medication would be similarly devastating. Withdrawal from prescription medication is terrible, full-stop.
But yes, I know what withdrawal is. I know how it feels. I know what it does. Personally. From the inside. And I know what withdrawal is because of these policies.
It is, however, a fear-mongering tactic, since a truly negligible amount of addictions begin with a doctor’s prescription written for the person who becomes addicted. They begin with a prescription written for a family member, something picked up at a party, et cetera. That these addictions are then furthered by doctor’s offices is a problem, yes, but that isn’t where the vast majority of abusive addictions begin. (There are an awful lot of studies out there on the topic, I encourage you to read where addiction actually begins).
The amount of ODs from opiate-based medication from those who have their pain medication prescribed by a pain management physician (or even, consistently, the same doctor) are actually pretty negligible and can largely be attributed to mismanagement of dosage (double-dosing due to not properly tracking dosage) or someone who is already in pain forgetting that they’ve taken breakthrough medication and taking a second round.
I’ve been on pain medication for multiple years at this point. You don’t get high anymore after a certain point – and that’s just… medical fact. The side effects drop away as your tolerance is built, and what remains is you not being in pain. For an addict, this is a problem, because then they have to seek higher and higher doses. For a legitimate patient, this is not a problem. This is living. This is good, because now I can go about my life.
Now, add on to this the fact that in order to get my prescriptions – because this is one of those lovely add-ons that I didn’t mention before – I have to get a shot into my spine every eight weeks or so. It doesn’t really do all that much, if anything, but my doctor is required to continue alternative treatments with me rather than simply prescribe the medication we know works. Now, this opens me up to a lot of really scary things, and I’ve been monitored more than once in the last 2 years for spinal cord/brain infections due to the fact that someone is sticking a needle into my spine every 2 months at most. Fun times in the ER being treated like a drug seeker because I have an infection in my back from the needle. Big thumbs up!
I’ve tried every other medicine under the sun, and the only thing that works without making me fall asleep behind the wheel of my car, turn into Dora from Finding Nemo, slur my words and sound like I’m drunk, et cetera.
The spectre of pain medication patients turning to heroin is – again – a mask, because it’s far more likely for a pain medication patient to commit suicide than to become a heroin addict. Buuuut that doesn’t fit with our pre-established ideas of what Those People Do, so we don’t talk about that part of it – that people who live in unending pain are far more likely to eat a bullet than to start shooting or snorting heroin. And if our system is making people turn to heroin when their pain medication is denied, isn’t that a problem?
Putting legitimate chronic pain patients through humiliating drug screens – which does… what, really? as we’ve seen above, all it did was deny a terminally ill patient his medication, and how many non-medical addicts does it catch? – requiring ‘alternate therapies’ lest the doctors be raided by the DEA, labeled pill mills and lose their license, etc. and even the way we discuss this (pain pills vs. pain medication – do we call it “psych pills?” “diabetes pills?” Does anyone call them “heart pills” outside of 1950s television?) is, yeah, fear-mongering. Add on to it that the overwhelming majority of chronic pain patients are women, and you have not only a medical issue but a heavily-gendered medical issue. I’m not surprised that we’re hearing about this with shock and horror when it happens to an aging male veteran when this happens to middle-aged women all of the time. (Hell, it’s super funny to make fun of female pain patients – just ask Patton Oswalt and his hilaaaarious ‘is oxycontin gluten-free?’ tweet. o ho ho me and my celiac are laughing real hard duder.)
Now. Are there problems with pill-shoppers? Sure are. There will be any time there is an available drug which gets people high. But this can be dealt with by the same functions that are already in place in many states; I would support nationalizing them in order to make things easier for tracking purposes, which should have the side effect of making it easier for patients to move from state to state, since their histories would be nationally-stored.
The way that pain medication prescriptions are already tracked in my state, I don’t know how well they’re tracked elsewhere, is pretty simple and pretty solid. If I go to pharmacy A and fill Medication X, and then try to go to pharmacy B and fill Medication X, even written by a 2nd doctor, they’ll say ‘no, sorry, you already filled that, it’s too soon.’ Pretty simple. Pee tests and requiring sometimes-dangerous ‘alternative therapies’ don’t accomplish anything meaningful, get into the relationship between the patient and doctor in a way that most women would (rightly) be screaming about if it were about reproductive rights, and strip people who have already lost too much of their lives to pain of the dignity which remains them.
tl;dr – there are a lot of other medications which can be used for a high and which can kill you, which we don’t treat the same way that we treat pain medication. The day we start instituting mandatory pee-tests for people taking Adderall**, and docs who prescribe Adderall are terrified of DEA raids, is the day I’m going to believe we’re legitimately interested in dealing with potentially-dangerous addictions and misuse across the board. Until then, yeah, pull the other one, it’s got bells on.
*Never mind the side effects of those off-label psych meds can be truly horrific, and that NSAIDs are worse for the gut in long-term use, affect bone density especially in those who can least afford to lose bone density, etc. A recent ten-year study of athletes showed that for long-term use of pain management, opioids caused the least physical damage – and these are people who are otherwise in good condition, and can best manage and mitigate side effects.
**Adderall can be fatal at as low as a single 15mg dose, which is less than the typical ADHD high school patient is prescribed.
So, interesting follow-up to this, since it cycled around to my dash again today: I’m sitting in my chair right now with four holes in my belly all stitched up neatly.
Why do I have four holes in my belly? Because I had my gall bladder pulled out on the 21st.
On the 20th, just after midnight, I was sent home from the ER with a diagnosis of ‘unspecified abdominal pain.’ They didn’t even do a fucking ultrasound. Why? Because when I told the doctor that I was a chronic pain patient and that I had a pain management doctor – so that he would not give me medication that would get me in trouble with my pain management doctor – he decided I was in his ER for THE DRUGZ, and he sent me home.
I came back in less than ten hours later, vomiting violently and dehydrated so badly that my arms look like I was beaten by a stick from the number of times I had to have them stab me to get an IV in me. (This is important because the night before they had no problem getting an IV in me. If I’d stayed in the hospital, they would have had that good IV for much longer.)
But no, this stigma that surrounds pain management and pain medication is SO STRONG that it got me sent home from the emergency room, only to come back much, much worse within half a day.
By the time I left the hospital, I’d had EIGHT separate IVs sunk in my arms, and that doesn’t count the number of times I had been stabbed trying to find a vein. I’m a hard stick on a good day.
They made sure it wasn’t a good day by their actions. By my 3rd day in the hospital, they were bringing in ICU nurses and charge nurses to do my IVs. They were talking about picc lines – for a fucking gallblader removal, do you understand?
And this is directly tied back to the fact that one doctor in the ER looked at me, said to himself ‘oh, she wants drugs,’ and kicked me out of the ER without even doing an ultrasound. He had been in the process of scheduling said ultrasound – we had discussed it – until I said ‘oh and I’m a pain management patient so please check in with my pain management doctor before you give me anything, I’m in a ton of pain but I can’t be violating the rules of my practice or I’ll get kicked out.’
This is so common that chronic pain patients are advised to carry letters with them from their pain management doctors just in case they need to go to the ER. It’s so common that I was repeatedly saying ‘no, I need to be given my maintenance medication AND the painkillers for acute pain, please keep me on my regular schedule’ and I nearly had a panic attack over it because I have been denied acute pain medication in the past since people believed that my maintenance pain medication should be enough to also handle acute pain. In that case, it was from having a chunk of my spine removed. But oh, your 20mg of oxy that you use to walk will take care of that, won’t it?
So yeah, tell me again about how good we handle pain in our medical system.
I’ll be sitting here with my arms looking like someone beat me up (and won’t that be fun going out into public with my husband for a while?), staring at you.