It's more than irritating, if not completly false to hear a doctor refer to opiate abuse and addiction by using misrepresented facts. According to the "National Institute on Drug Abuse" West Virgina recorded opiate deaths at rate 49.6 deaths per 100,000 people. What these FDA fed statistics don't tell us is that nearly all of those deaths are people using illicitly obtained opiate medications, are herion addicts, or are crushing then injecting their legally prescribed pain meds.
The other misinformation above states that the only way someone can become addicted or dependant on prescribed opiates is if they're abusing them. This is a straight out and out lie. I have been taking 240 mgs of oxycontin ER and 120 mgs of oxycodone IR for 19 years. I have never, nit one time ever deviated from the prescribed doses, yet I am severely dependant. What's more, when I started taking the oxycontin in July of 2000, that doctor never told me it was an opiate, not did the pharmacy. After 2 years I learned from my pharmacist that it was in fact an opiate. I then went to my doctor with that information, to which he assured me that I couldn't possibly become dependant on those medications. That if I took them as prescribed I had nothing to fear. Well, here I am 19 years later, still taking them for chronic pain, but severely dependant. I have not one time run out early or ever requested an early fill. And now that all this false misinformation regarding dependancy and abuse is being fed to Americans. I'm now labeled as a drug addict thanks to the FDA, who BTW has no business dictating what medications and dosage treatment is right for me. As a result my 19 years of uneventful opiate pain management history will now be reducing me to a withdrawing addict starting this coming month. I an an elderly man, the road ahead will probably cost me my life, but the doctors and the FDA aren't concerned about my well being, only false statistics that promote their political agenda. Nothing they've concluded and sold to America has anything to do with me or others like me, we're just the victims who will pay the ultimate price. My last doctor of 10 years quit his practice because he couldn't allow the government to dictate his pain management agenda for patients the government knows absolutely nothing about.
We are now being mistreated by puppet physicians whose primary agenda is making money by bending over for the government agencies calling the shots. These physicians that are still bin practice, thus playing ball with the agencies, really have no real interest in maintaining long term opiate treatment for patients who have uneventfully and according to prescribed instructions taken these medications for 5, 10 or 19 years as it were. Nope, they just look at us and tell us we will have our medications reduced to near nothing, and then do so with a cold, deliberate condecending approach. I'm furious, as well destitute. I'm now a candidate for an illicitly solution, something the government agencies are probably counting on, so as to promote the rehabilitation industry. What could be easier than dropping otherwise law abiding citizens on their preverbile drug dependant faces, thus forcing them either into illicite drug use, thus leading to a drug rehab facility, or death by herion over dose. Thank you FDA for managing my pain management future, ER mismanaging.
As for the comment above regarding methadone, ya, I took it for about a month and almost stopped breathing.