Anyway I can not see any reason why if under control if they help us then what’s the harm?
I agree, Nan. The problem, of course, is that there is no way for anyone except the user to know whether it is truly under control or not, and of course that can change without the doctor knowing it. The bottom line here of course isn't about people who can and do use pain medication responsibly, but those who don't.
By now we all know that the real blame for the opioid crisis doesn't belong to the people to whom it was prescribed for pain, but rather the manufacturers who gave incentives to doctors for prescribing it over and over, and the many doctors who put their own benefit ahead of the health of their patients and kept prescribing it without being responsible to their patients. In other words, greed drove the whole thing, and it was not greed on the part of the patients. At least, not until those patients became addicted and even then I don't call it greed because a truly addicted person is at the mercy of the addiction unless they can break it, which usually requires they have help to do so. Rather than help them, many doctors just continued letting them have the drug.
When the laws changed and it was not so easy to continue that, and those same people did not get help to break an addiction they many not even have known they had, many turned to other drugs that were available without prescription.
Tapering off opioids definitely will produce more pain for many people.
When opioids became harder to get and I had to start jumping through hoops to get the medication prescribed to me, I decided that I needed to quit that kind of medication altogether, so I did. That led me into a dedicated search for other ways to manage the pain and fatigue, which in turn led me to all the experimenting I did and all the things I learned from that, much of which allows me to pass good information along to others now.
It’s really not the doctors that are controlling what is prescribed,it’s the government who created this problem.
The government is not creating the problem, actually, not did they create it initially. The problem was created as I stated above by first and foremost the pharmaceutical companies who were raking in the bucks by selling more and more opioid medication, and the doctors who went along with it at their patient's expense. The government only stepped in belatedly, and is now regulating those meds because of the huge problem that was caused when so many people became addicted. It is a bit too late for many thousands of people who never expected to get addicted and now suffer the consequences, but better late than never. It should be noted that the government is attempting to solve the problem - they did not create it in the first place.
However...... just regulating the availability of prescription meds won't solve the problem, as it is a many-faceted thing now and needs a multi-faceted approach. Which is true of so many problems we have now. And as always with this kind of thing, innocent people (in this case folks who can and do use the medications responsibly) will suffer due to the regulations put in place in an attempt to solve the larger picture problem.
