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Well look..pain is subjective. What feels overwhelmingly painful to you might feel like a minor irritation to someone else. Walk into the doctors office and tell them your leg (or any body part) hurts and you might get prescribed opiates,but you might just as easily be told to take aspirin.
I'm no stranger to the opiate controversy. I was at one time addicted to heroin to deal with pain that went untreated for a very long time, but I couldn't find a doctor willing to treat my pain because I had no medical insurance so my only option at the time was to go to the streets to self medicate and by doing so was labeled a criminal. Had a doctor prescribed it I would have been perfectly legal.
I even told people at the ER that they were forcing me to do things that were illegal and their response? Do what you have to do, but we're not going to prescribe opiates. My injury at the time was a broken eye socket and several screws to hold my head together, but for some reason I wasn't going to be allowed to treat the pain legally.
I'm to the point anymore that I simply don't believe anything I read or hear in the news about opiates. According to the news people are dying at the rate of a total out and out war because of opiates which simply isn't true. If it were true everyone who ever took a pain pill would die, but they don't..
What is true is that opiates are addictive, but so are many perfectly legal substances and some are even deadlier such as cigarette smoking.
I have no qualms about medical marijuana or marijuana use by anyone for any reason they see fit, but it's not the cure all to end all cure alls. I've used both opiates and marijuana and opiates knock out pain much more effectively. The problem isn't really with the opiates, it's with the way our society is consistently mislead and lied to.
Remember needle exchanges? We were told that needle exchanges would only encourage more people to use heroin and forget that it could save lives by preventing preventable diseases because anyone using heroin probably deserves to die anyway. That was the kind of thinking that gets people killed.
The truth of the matter is that you can't outlaw everything that might kill you. Taking a bath might kill you if you slip and drown, but nobody is talking about outlawing taking a bath nor should they.
So we're at this point where it's ok for entire football teams to be addicted to opiate pain killers,but if you get addicted by either prescribed medication or even street medication you might as well consider yourself a criminal and your morals will always be suspect.
I've struggled with addiction on and off for many years and at this point in my life I pretty much know how much is ok to take and how much is too much, but even openly talking about it can make me a suspect that I may be engaging in illegal activity.
My father, 87 years old is prescribed a lot of opiate pain medication and he watches the news every day so much so he's convinced himself that he's a junkie and the police will be breaking down the door any time now. Forget that it's all precribed by two highly respected doctors. It's "dope" in his mind and his morals are all flawed despite the fact that he suffers from severe spinal stenosis.
Is it ok for football players to be handed out opiates like candy just so we can all be entertained on Sundays while others are locked up in prisons for treating their own pain without the consent of their doctors? Of course it isn't, but welcome to the world of hypocrisy to the extreme.
In the immortal words of my old man, "Wait'll you get to be my age!"
Chicago sounds rough to the maker of verse, but the one comfort we have is Cincinnati sounds worse. ~Oliver Wendal Holmes Sr.
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3 of my closest friends from the Marine Corps got hurt serving. One was a child hood friend. When i got back and saw the drugs the VA was throwing at him i couldnt believe it. They had him hooked big time. Out of the three. His injuries were the worst. The shock trauma medical center in baltimore that put him back together called him the million dollar man because that is what it took to fix him. A few years down the road when he didnt need a wheel chair anymore and he realized how hooked he was on opiates he finally told the VA to piss off after failing a drug test for weed. Rather than get free drugs from the government he treated the pain himself skirting the law and smoking weed. He said that was all he needed.
The other two stayed addicted. And obviously these opiate addictions grow over time as tolerance goes up. Combined with the PTSD the VA just giving them crazy amounts of opiates couldnt have done them any good. One went missing for over a month and was found dead in a drainage ditch. The other hung himself about a year later. And i guarantee being addicted to powerful physically addictive drugs didnt do them any good. If weed was legal i think there is a strong chance my two friends would still be alive.
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We do an absolutely horrible job of educating pain patients.. Opiate use is treated as a moral issue when in fact it is absolutely necessary when the pain in your body arises to the level where you can no longer do every day things for yourself and pain as we all know can completely disable people.
Addiction doesn't always come from abuse by people trying to get high .
My father absolutely hates the feeling opiates give him, but he has no choice in the matter. Without them he'd be bed ridden and with them he's on a continual upward spiral of using more and more. He's 87 and has had multiple heart surgeries so a forced withdraw would very likely kill him not to mention leaving him bed ridden if he even survived it.
If you've never had to go through opiate withdraw I certainly don't advise you to try it unless you absolutely have to. Most people who have had to go through it would rather just go ahead and die than have to do it again. It's that painful and miserable. You'll literally feel like your body is melting from the inside out. It brings on the feeling of panic like nothing else I've ever experienced and I've had to go through it in a jail cell more than once and so we get millions of people forced to go through it needlessly when there are alternatives that make weening off of opiates that you have to go to a specialty clinic run by hacks instead of being able to do it with your doctor without the bureaucratic BS. In most states your family doctor cannot even prescribe the drugs that make weening off opiates possible. They can't prescribe methadone or any of the other drugs so if you're addicted you pretty much have to go to a drug treatment facility and submit to all the rules and regulations that makes life miserable and you WILL BE treated just like a criminal regardless of the reasons for becoming addicted in the first place.
Marijuana while helpful is never going to do the job of weening people off of high doses of opiate pain killers. It's a completely different type of reaction inside the human body.
One 'herb' very useful and legal in most states still is kratom.
Real quick...Opioids act by attaching to specific proteins called opioid receptors, which are found in the brain, spinal cord, ... Marijuana doesn't have enough of the necessary ingredients ,but I'm not going to give you a course on phamacology here.. Kratom has the ingredients and it works well. You can buy it over the counter in head shops or much less expensive online and treat opiate addiction at home and yet it's getting a lot of bad press by extremely lazy news organizations who want to label it as the next heroin scurge even though it doesn't give you the same high and it tastes horrible.
In the immortal words of my old man, "Wait'll you get to be my age!"
Chicago sounds rough to the maker of verse, but the one comfort we have is Cincinnati sounds worse. ~Oliver Wendal Holmes Sr.
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The government needs to finally admit that Harry J. Anslinger did U.S. citizens a disservice by out right lying about the effects of marijuana. Then the DEA needs to reschedule marijuana. The fact methadone, oxycodone, hydrocodone, and fentanyl are schedule II while marijuana is schedule I is asinine. Once marijuana is schedule properly then there won't be so much regulation preventing real research into potential medical uses for marijuana and/or its derivatives like Marinol.
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Hard for big pharma to make money when people could grow the medicine at their house though.
Going from having probably millions addicted to their drugs to people supplying their own medicine. It is their nightmare.
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People who get addicted to medications aren't generally addicted to marijuana at least not in the same ball park as opiates. Marijuana is more of a mental addiction unlike opiates that will make you violently sick from withdraw and I have a hunch that sooner or later they wont be locking people away for possession of either. A simple truth is the government could care less about your overall health, but does care about how much money you can generate for the economy. The drug wars have been a huge drain on national treasure. They finally began figuring that out when they realized that it cost billions a year to keep millions locked up.
The pharmaceutical industry really can't compete with the giant money pits of prisons regardless of who operate them be it the public or for profit prison industries. Neither one provides much use to the public at large other than getting violent people off the street.
In the immortal words of my old man, "Wait'll you get to be my age!"
Chicago sounds rough to the maker of verse, but the one comfort we have is Cincinnati sounds worse. ~Oliver Wendal Holmes Sr.
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