3 ms·

It does not take much, I had injury that resulted in a prescription and once it's no longer hitting just the pain receptors (I don't really understand how this

It does not take much, I had injury that resulted in a prescription and once it's no longer hitting just the pain receptors (I don't really understand how this all works or claim to) and you feel the "calming" effect you can pretty quickly see why it can become so addictive and scary. Even being educated, happy, well-off, and aware you can fall to these type of addictions, I can't imagine how hard it must be for many others.

MichaelMoser123 9y ago
i am a foreigner trying to understand this issue: why don't they just stop prescribing opium based pain killers to the general public and limit them to cancer patients - like they do in the rest of the world, wouldn't that scale down the crisis? How did the problem get this large? Even Imperial China went to war when Britain started pushing Opium to the public, why wasn't this whole thing stopped much earlier?
- rand_r 9y ago
  Opium-based pain killers are the most reliable way to ease pain without causing organ damage in the near term. Drugs like Advil and Tylenol cause organ damage even at small doses and are thus unusable for extreme pain. Opiates are used the world over for pain relief, not just for cancer patients. If we had a way to ease pain with something non-addictive that didn’t cause immediate organ damage that would be great.
  - MichaelMoser123 9y ago
    But only in the US there is overprescription and a crisis. Why?
  - zoul 9y ago
    The key difference is the easy availability in the US. It seems to me that the GPs are eager to prescribe you some opiates, whereas here in the Czech Republic they would have to go through quite a lot red tape to do that. Which, given the potential harm, seems like a good idea. (Even though we do have some problems with opiates not being used often enough. But compared to the US situation that’s a great problem to have.)

MichaelMoser123 9y ago

i am a foreigner trying to understand this issue: why don't they just stop prescribing opium based pain killers to the general public and limit them to cancer patients - like they do in the rest of the world, wouldn't that scale down the crisis? How did the problem get this large? Even Imperial China went to war when Britain started pushing Opium to the public, why wasn't this whole thing stopped much earlier?

rand_r 9y ago
Opium-based pain killers are the most reliable way to ease pain without causing organ damage in the near term. Drugs like Advil and Tylenol cause organ damage even at small doses and are thus unusable for extreme pain. Opiates are used the world over for pain relief, not just for cancer patients. If we had a way to ease pain with something non-addictive that didn’t cause immediate organ damage that would be great.
- MichaelMoser123 9y ago
  But only in the US there is overprescription and a crisis. Why?
- zoul 9y ago
  The key difference is the easy availability in the US. It seems to me that the GPs are eager to prescribe you some opiates, whereas here in the Czech Republic they would have to go through quite a lot red tape to do that. Which, given the potential harm, seems like a good idea. (Even though we do have some problems with opiates not being used often enough. But compared to the US situation that’s a great problem to have.)