opiate use must be the choice of individuals and not authorities

Date:   9/9/2006 3:16:29 PM ( 18 y ago)

The War on Drugs is creating the drug problem. It has been tried for long enough time and has failed us.

One way we went wrong was in trying to engineer a perfect society by "steering people". It was thought that we could nterfere with their choices so they will choose the right way. Drugs were thought to be a problem because the use of them would make peope irresponsible. Well, we have an abundance of irresponsible people anyhow, and more drug use than would have normally occured.

When people do activites like taking drugs, or being gay, nobody is being forced to take part. We made those two examples, those two activities, illegal for a long time despite that fact that those people are not forcing others to do anything they don't like to do. The result was that gay people and drug users became shamed and neurotic about their status, which has fallout like family breakdown and inability to hold a job. Working is almost essential to getting along in out world, and people who take drugs are tested and cannot work - a direct and condoned negative effect on drug users, almost as if the authorities were trying to make drug users "failures". Homosexuals are similiarly persecuted in the workplace.

Not surprisingly, this fallout from the effects of prohibition is used as "evidence" that drug use or being gay is bad. Create the Problem and use it as evidence against those you create the problem for?? What effect could that possibly have , other than to mess up society!!

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For the drug issue, a different way is being proposed by some Mayors of large cities as they grasp for ways to reduce the crimes committed to get drugs:
"Give the addicts the drugs, and they won't commit crimes".

After all, it is the crimes that are the most obvious problem with drug use. The War on Drugs causes this behavior where the addicts affect others negatively [crimes] because the cost of drugs is artificially high and they need money to get them. Without prohibition, this would not occur as much, and by supplying drugs, it won't likely happen at all. No addict enjoys stealing.

Another serious aspect is prescription opiate drugs like morphine. The Doctors associations have been telling the doctors how to prescribe, and they havem and still are, imposing heavy fines and sanctions against doctors who do not toe the line. I know a doc who was fined over $15,000 in one year for over-prescribing morphine to people in pain.

When morphine is taken for a long time, "tolerance" occurs. Thats where the user does not get the same effect from the same dose, and they require higher doses. One way to get around tolerance is to stop taking the drugs, even just for a fewe days, to get that tolerance down to where their normal prescription doseage will be effective again. For someone in serious pain, it is nearly impossible to stop for just a few days, even one day, because there is much worse pains than they are used to in the withdrawl symptoms. The withdrawal symptoms are added to their normal pain levels, and it becomes outrageous to "just wait, its only one day". A day is very very long under that agony, and especially difficult to refrain from doing whatever you can to find some more drugs when you know there is a simple and quick way to reduce those pains - just get some.

The fact that most people cannot do it like that - stop for a few days and go thru withdrawals - indicates just how agonising it is. Well meaning responsible people do not manage to do it very often, although there are some on certain days that can do it. Almost all who try to quit will fail at least five times. It is very difficult, and we should not blame the addict for not beinga ble to do it. We should not punish them for it.

But we do - it is like purgatory when you reach tolerance of your prescribed doseage. Only part of the day is mildly relieved by the dose. This goes on day in a nd day out for a year, and people nbaturally will seek more drugs than the doctors are handing out. There is a myth that if we let them have regular increaseds that soon all addicts would be taking huge amounts of drugs every day - its not true because there is allways an "upper limit" where the addict will be sustained by that dose almost forever. For most, that upper limit is about 300mg. to 500mg, and sure enough, the Doctors stop increasing doses of morphine at about 250 mg.

What I propose is for Doctors to prescribe morphine with 25% increases every 6 mos - that was the standard for increases that was accepted by the AMA for about 50 years until the 1980s. Patients will get those increases until they reach 500mg, and then the increases will stop in most cases.

That alone would cut crimes from drug addicts a little bit, although most crimes over drugs are committed by addicts without any prescription at all.

One more issue is injecting opiates - it is declared an abuse despite the fact injecting morphine is better for you: and the drug is more effective with less gut problems. Mostly, it is just a choice for patients that does not affect anyone else, so why persecute them for injecting? Its a reasonable choice. It is safe too, I can show you 1000 people who injecte three times a day and have no ill effects, because they do it right. Its not hurting anyone else either. All thru history people inject opiates, it is the standard way.

However, if a doctor or health nurse sees evidence of injecting, they call it "abusing the prescrption", and will cut the patient off of the prescription.

I know of one addict that never injected in many yyears of being prescribed morphine and never buying it or any abuses at all, until the doctors cut her dose to about 10% of what she was used to - she started injecting to make it work better. This is so typical of the doctor's idiocy. They create problems that they then use to declare the patient a problem. It is outrageous that we treat people in chronic pain this way.

People with chronic pain, conditions where there is not any defining diagnosis, are in trouble when doctors must have clinical evidence before prescribing opiates. There is no such evidence, so the doctors are not prescribing to them for fear of being sanctioned by the medical association. Even for those chronic pain patients that have been geting a morphine prescription for many years may find themselves with another doctor if the patient moves or their doc retires, and are refused their prescription.

Personally, I have been to clinics that say "we don't treat chronic pain cases with opiates here", not even if the patient has been on prescription morphine for many years. They are content to let me go thru withdrawals, and experience the underlying pains that have been "hidden" by the masking of taking regular morphine that I will find out how bad they are at the same time as I go thru withdrawals. I barely survived long enough to find street morphine...












 

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