The drug war is so futile, so destructive, and so depressing at this point that it’s almost not even worth discussing. It’s a whole lot of senseless insanity as I see it, and nobody involved seems to have their wits about them. For example, how could anyone reconcile these 2 recent news items about prescription drugs:
- A recent report shows that since oxycontin has been chemically altered so that it’s harder to get “high” from it, the users of the drug have simply switched to heroin. Or as the LA Times so eloquently summed it up: “In the record book of unintended consequences, this one’s sure to be a groan-worthy entry: A frightening rise in addiction to the drug OxyContin prompts a reformulation that makes the prescription pain medication harder to abuse. So addicts switch to heroin instead.”
- A newly proposed New York State law will create an online database that alerts doctors to patients who may be pill-shopping. The legislators writing it modestly dubbed it “a model for the country”.
If the proposed law serves as a model for anything, it’s a model of how to look like you’re helping while simultaneously being completely clueless. As I previously commented on the reformulated oxycontin, anyone with half a brain could see the switch to heroin coming from a mile away – as well as the abscesses and other pitfalls that users of the drug would get into as they adjusted to the changes in the drug. Likewise, anyone can see that this new law will only push drug use further underground, and potentially create more violence as it becomes harder to get a supply of drugs prescribed by doctors, and dealers stoop to armed robberies of pharmacies. We can be sure that other unintended consequences will pop up, and what good will it do?
Do we get something for all of these trade-offs? Do anyone’s lives improve? Is “addiction” stopped?
The problem with this new proposed law, and the Oxycontin reformulation, and countless other policies and approaches to substance use problems is this: they are attempts to control human desire through supply.
Desire isn’t changed by blunt force, and in fact such force usually only entrenches desire. People change their desires only by surveying and weighing their range of potential life options. If people want to get high, they will find a way to do it – no matter what. If you take the natural options off the table, they’ll likely come up with unnatural options. Once you eliminate those chemicals from the market, they’ll do strange stuff like choking themselves, or otherwise harming themselves. There are infinite as-yet-unimagined cheap thrills which people can chase. These lawmakers wrongly believe that supply creates demand. The reformulated Oxycontin fiasco should prove this approach to be 100% wrong. Demand doesn’t go away because supply is decreased – demand only gets more desperate.
The last thing we should be doing is engaging in cat and mouse with people over there desire for cheap thrills. How about we just let people get high, so they can get sick of it and move on to bigger better things? Instead we engage in a battle of wills, rather than letting people naturally evolve and change their will.
SOURCES:
CA has had this online database for years, and due to inadequate funding, and lack of requirement to use it, it was really not being used. I doctor shopped in CA from 2000- 2010, and I was never cut off or cited. Once, a doctor in urgent care requested my records from this database, and on a follow up visit they refused to write me any more than 20 vicodin. The only other time a doctor used this database with me was to check my history before writing me a script in 2010, and I used that as an opening to discuss getting on suboxone because I had seen a suboxone flyer in her office by the check out window. If they want to stop drug addiction, they should post self help flyers like that at pharmacies.
One of the doctors who wrote my scripts got letters from this database twice over the year or so I saw him, and refused to write me a prescription until the following month. I was surprised he didn’t cut me off entirely. Nobody ever contacted me about my excessive doctor shopping.
In the end, I always was grateful for all those scripts I got. I had to get my satisfaction of pills to realize, I didn’t want them anymore.
I think the world is getting stranger and stranger all the time. Im glad I grew up in the 70’s. Whew!:)
While the oxycontin alteration might have had unintended consequences, all I can say is who cares? I get that people want to get high, but in my eyes there is a huge difference between popping pills and shooting heroin – though as someone who has not done either maybe I am presumptuous. But if drug use is a choice (which I believe it to be), then these people have a choice to either get into heavier, underground, illegal stuff – or not to. I get that the drug war is a waste of money and is dangerous etc., but while I get the premise of legalizing/regulating/taxing things like marijuana, I can’t actually imagine doing that with heroin, coke, meth, etc.
I guess my point is – why criticize the makers of oxycontin as if they did something wrong? Their goal was to stop abuse of the thing they produce, and it seems to have worked. It’s not their fault that people out there are so eager to get high and abuse the prescription drug system, or are willing to switch to heroin. Whose fault is that?
I think this goes to the bigger point that has been made on this site before – accountability. There is this attitude that “these poor helpless addicts couldn’t help it, they needed SOMETHING, so they switched to heroin.” But that’s not oxycontin-producers’ fault, nor is it their problem. That’s the fault of people who don’t respect their life enough to avoid something as easy to avoid as heroin. THEY are the people who should be mocked, chastised, or otherwise held accountable for this situation. In my opinion, of course.
I’m not criticizing the makers of Oxycontin – I’m criticizing the wider approach of society trying to control substance use, especially by use of the law. You can bet the makers of Oxycontin were pressured by the government to reformulate.
As a chronic pain patient, I am deeply concerned that people like me who are law abiding citizens with incurable & painful medical problems will be punished for the actions of others who use prescription drugs for unauthorized purposes. Considering how many crimes involve cars, and that no senators or congressmen are suggesting we restrict access to cars to reduce crime, it’s not only absurd but insulting for our elected officials to assume that it’s ok to let citizens who are not committing any crime but only suffer painful medical problems to be forced to do without a scientifically proven & reliable way to treat pain. Chronic pain patients already live under many restrictions – can only use one pharmacy, only get pain meds prescribed by one doctor (a real annoyance after surgery, when the surgeon requires the patient to be discharged with a pain Rx & the one prescribing doctor turns out to be on a vaca in Guyana), get pee tested to prove they are actually taking all the prescribed meds, forced to sign “contracts” in which they say they understand that they may develop “addiction”, dentists resisting giving the patient nitrous when they see the patient takes opiate pain meds…..
As a pain patient, I also want to point out that “alternative” pain treatments – accupuncture, accupressure, massage, visualizing, distraction, herbs, etc., – Do Not Work for severe pain. Period.