Yeah, its pretty disgusting the way pain patients, whether trying to get high or otherwise, are treated. When things have got to the point that physicians and politicians are more interested in bitching about opioids than they are in relieving people of their pain, when such patients have say, been smashed to bits in a car wreck, I've heard from folk on forums for drug users (I'm on one that coveres everything from basic questions, to a subforum for advanced neuropharmacology discussion, the site is both about harm reduction from recreationals, reviewing new and old ones, sharing reports, experiences, problems, with regional social forums, its called bluelight (dot org), and I've heard from SO many pain patients, where the evidence to back it up that they were in agony was incontrovertible, and quite beyond fakery, MRI, CT, X-ray scans showing one guy had broken his first cervical vertebra, and had hairline fractions down the next few, body mashed up like meatpaste, and the poor bastard had to tolerate his doctors slashing his pain script because 'oh opioids are just bad, mmkay, you might abuse them'.
IIRC he ended up having to score from the street, with the attendant risks, just to remain somewhat able, to not be a crippled husk. When its got that bad, and because of this happening en-masse, driving many pain patients to street heroin and other opioids because they can't even manage to get enough not to otherwise undergo physical withdrawal for a portion of the time, because their script is either too small to begin with, or due to politicking and other such sliming about in the corridors of power, pressure exerted from the powers-that-be on doctors, in the US even prosecuting doctors who in someone's opinion is giving out too many pain scripts. And not even giving out too many scripts to the same individual person, just too many scripts viewed as a single entity, which of course, given they are going to many individual, separate people, CANNOT legitimately be viewed as a singular uniform entity.
Jail terms have even been handed out, doctors are being forced to cower in fear, because of political pressure, and this of course, hurts them, impairs their ability to practice medicine, which IMO, the practice of medicine, is the realm of the physician, not that of the politician. When they stick their filthy, slimy little tentacles in that pie, people suffer. And the people who suffer the most are those at the very bottom of the food chain, the patients themselves with the medical needs.
The system, quite plainly, is broken, especially when patients are being forced, because quite simply, the quantity of pain medication they need, both for satisfactory pain relief and to avoid physical withdrawal CANNOT be eked out thinly enough to last from one script to the next, be it by a day or two, or for some people, weeks.
I know what thats like. I have the choice to make, the faustian bargain to strike, in that I either take opioid pain meds, or I am virtually incapacitated by pain, and without being on the meds, it is physically very difficult, arduous and unpleasant to walk what would be ten minutes for most people, without trick knee and hips, and the amount of pain medication I receive, I cannot, biologically speaking, take it by mouth (the morphine), it has an oral bioavailability of twenty to at most thirty percent, for a few outliers with cytochrome P450-3A4 and P450-2D6 loss of function mutations, twenty to twenty something is more like it. I must either purify it and prepare it for intramuscular injection, liquefy it and dose it rectally (the bioavailability rises to at least 80% or so if the latter is done), or of course, do something which lies outside the capacity of most patients because they lack the knowledge and specialist skillset, and the equipment to perform the tasks in question, and subject the morphine to such chemical modifications as to vastly improve both potency, analgesic efficacy and duration of action, although the oral bioavailability (the compound I have in mind, is the 3,6-dipropionyl ester of morphine, which is at LEAST as potent again compared to diamorphine (heroin), as H is to morphine, or morphine is compared to codeine. Very potent, but not so potent as to present a danger in handling microscopic traces invisible to the naked eye, as with the fentanyls, which are common contaminants in street H if your source is not highly reliable and one goes down that route, its safe enough to physically open a vial, scoop some out with a spatula or other such implement and weigh it on a sensitive analytical lab balance such as I have (its accurate to within a single milligram, max capacity 50g, comes with calibration weights, tweezers for handling the weights so as not to throw them off tare by coming into contact with skin oils, dust particles etc. Very, very sensitive, and a most useful tool, both for the chemistry I love, and for dosing such things as dipropionylmorphine), and without my needing a biohazard suit and fume hood with double layers of gloves just to touch the bottle, as would be the case with fentanyls (which I might add, I will have nothing to do with outside the context of surgical anaesthesia, I've refused a script for it, well, I got the script, tried it and went straight back the next day asking for my original pain med regime back, because I hated everything about fentanyl, and I ABSOLUTELY shun this family of opioids both on the street, and even more so within my lab. I wouldn't even accept a comission to manufacture them, not for any money)
All in all, it is plain to see, the system is broken. Its both saddening and disgusting. And to be honest, quite offensive to be treated as a suspect, rather than a patient, or, some docs will treat pain patients with outright sneering disgust, as if they were crack whores selling their body for rock (even they, deserve some compassion IMO, I certainly wouldn't sleep with one, but I don't want to see them suffer either)
I either have to spend a portion of my income I'd rather spend on tricking out the lab, just to stay able and un-crippled, and able to walk properly, or endure physical withdrawal because the script I get is just a bit too small to last the entire week. Or make my own (or the first and last option), the middle option being just intolerable, its quite a hellish experience I wouldn't wish on anyone who didn't really, really piss.me.OFF.
Doesn't even take that much of an increase, in what I have, and I'd be happy enough with just a little more than sufficient, so that there are a few days backup in case either of emergency of unforseeable nature, or having to travel, and stay away from home for some time, etc. I'm very glad that I have a friend who has a private doctor-issued methadone prescription, but he prefers H, whilst I prefer methadone, and while he doesn't make a monetary net profit, he gets to exchange his methadone, minus a portion to serve as his backup, for money he can spend on H. He gets his preferred opiate, H, whilst I get mine, pharmaceutical methadone, in tablet form, which unlike the liquid, can't be adulterated. The exchange works for both of us, particularly as I have both normal pain and neuropathic pain, and due to its somewhat different pharmacology to many opioids, methadone works for both, unlike most opioids.
Still, the system, I.e the whole politically contaminated fucked medical system, it is broken, and in a way that heaps the majority of, and the worst kind of suffering, of all the suffering it generates for all who suffer under that system, it all falls down to the lowest level, that of the patient, who is forced to buy his own umbrella to ward off the rain of faecal matter falling from on high. Whilst those at the very top? the political meddling vermin? they don't suffer.
Call me a cynic, if you must, but Wherever I see politicians politicking, meddling and sticking their noxious, grubby little paws in other people's pies, they don't just take their slice of the pie, but they have to defaecate all over the rest of it so nobody else gets a slice of anything but shit covered pie. I'd sooner see things return to the days when those at the bottom could have ice cream with it too, not just those at the very top, who of course, are ignorant of medicine.
Fucking bunch of bastards. Its always the way. Those on top always seem to feel the compulsive need to shit on those on any rung of the ladder below the very top, the lower you are, the more people there are to shit on you.
And another bitch-it shouldn't be the case, that catching a single person who IS solely about getting the drugs to get high, is viewed and treated as worth the abject misery and suffering, damage to livelyhood and families of a near infinite number of genuine pain patients. Or for a genuine pain patient who ISN'T drug seeking, who takes their medication, and does so faithfully, if they do experience euphoria and a high, its viewed as a bad, dirty, disgusting and almost EVIL thing.
And, my last thought on the matter, for now, although it isn't restricted to only medicine, recreational drug use, both, but as a general principle which does apply here, is that IMO anybody who can find it within themselves to view pleasure in others as an evil thing to be squashed, and all the more so whilst of course, never applying that rule to themselves, that is the mark of a bad, bad excuse for a human being. Those who would crusade and rail against other people experiencing pleasure, in and of itself, that is a bad person.
