All of a sudden, we're hearing a lot about The Opioid Epidemic, which has apparently been with us for a while without a whole lot of notice. Here's what seems to be a good explainer about it.
There is pretty close to a zero chance of me ever developing an addiction to opioids. As I wrote here a few years ago…
My mother used to consume Vicodin like those great Molasses Chips bars that come in assortments of See's Candy. The time I took my one and only Vicodin, which was in connection with some minor surgery, I got violently seasick on dry land.
I had my [knee] surgery on Monday. After, there was much pain, especially if I did anything foolish like moving my leg or exhaling. They gave me Norco. It had no effect. They gave me a higher dosage of Norco. Still no effect. Then they tried Dilaudid. That did have an effect: It made me nauseous and dizzy. The leg remained indifferent and ablaze.
The Dilaudid experiment was in the wee small hours of Tuesday morning. Once it had failed, doctors were unreachable and my nurse wasn't authorized to give me anything else so I suffered until about 7:30 AM when my surgeon made his rounds to see how I was doing. When he found out, he ordered up a new nerve block for my leg, like the nerve block they'd used along with other anesthetics during the surgery. For reasons they explained but which I'm not sure I can replicate here, the second block wouldn't take so we plunged back into trying other drugs.
Morphine didn't work on me. Percoset didn't work on me. OxyContin didn't do a thing for my pain but it did make me very, very stupid for most of one night. Finally, I understand this Rush Limbaugh thing.
They finally tried a muscle relaxer plus a couple of more conventional pain medicines and that worked. I was supposed to take them for six weeks but I quit after ten days and I probably could have stopped sooner. Since then when I read about folks with terrible addictions, I wonder how many of them could simply have stopped sooner? Might the problem not be the drugs but the duration? Someone made a lot more money by issuing me a six week supply than if they'd given me a two-week supply plus a prescription for refills.
I'm not suggesting some folks don't need this stuff for a long, long time. The two most important people in my life lately — my mother who died 2012 and my lovely friend Carolyn who left us this past April — were loaded with opioids and other drugs in their last years and clearly needed most if not all of them. Okay, but those were women who were dying and in great pain. There are people who take these drugs to good effect. The trouble might be for some of them that they don't stop when they no longer need the drugs and before they develop a dependency.
The other day, Trump gave one of his typical know-nothing answers when he said, "If they don't start, they won't have a problem. If they do start, it's awfully tough to get off. So if we can keep them from going on and maybe by talking to youth and telling them: 'No good, really bad for you in every way.'" That's stupid because it's not true. They're good for you some times in some ways. When we lie to kids, they don't listen. It's just like when people try to tell horny teenagers that sex outside of marriage is not a good thing. They know damn well that it is a good thing in some ways so they don't learn any lesson there. Few campaigns in this country have been more spectacular failures than Abstinence Education…
…and here's Trump trying to tell kids that drugs that alleviate great pain for some are "really bad for you in every way" and not to ever take them. He's also treating the problem as if it's unique to kids, which clearly it is not.
I don't know how to curb the Opioid Epidemic and of course, it's not my job or even my problem. I'm just tossing out there the thought that maybe the solution starts with being really realistic about the good and bad of it, which includes acknowledging the good. And maybe it wouldn't hurt to tell people that they should discuss with their doctors if they really need the full dosage that is printed on the bottle. Maybe some of them are taking things for six weeks that they really only need for ten days.