How about stop the kick backs doctors get for prescribing them? Obviously the fact that they’re so readily available is an issue, but there are people that honestly need them for their pain. Are there long term alternatives? Yes, are they affordable in the United States? Probably not.
THE SOLUTION TO THE OPIATE CRISIS IS MOTHERFUCKING NOT TO MAKE OPIATES MORE ILLEGAL OR HARDER TO GET
IT JUST FUCKING ISN’T!!!!!!!!!
Actually, the problem is not that they’re so readily available. They’re selectively readily available.
What started this all was really OxyContin’s 12-hour dosing problem: Purdue lied about how long it’s effective for. The drug only lasts 8 hours for most people. If someone gets a month of Oxy, and takes a pill every time the last one wore off, they run out of pills on Day 21. And Purdue sued doctors for saying, “Okay, if you need three a day instead of two, I’ll just give you 90 for the month instead of 60.”
Also, the instant a doctor suspects their patient has become addicted to the drugs, they have to cut them off cold turkey. If someone just wants the drugs too much–say, they come in and say, “I’ve run out of those painkillers you gave me, they worked great but I went through them too fast”–a doctor can be legally prosecuted for writing them a scrip, because Drug Addicts Don’t Deserve Health Care.
2. Buy black-market opiates, which are probably unevenly-diluted fentanyl or carfentanil, and risk dying of an overdose.
Option 3, which is missing: THE DOCTOR JUST GIVES THEM AN EXTRA PILL A FUCKING DAY.
Option 4: The doctor gives them a different, lesser opioid, and helps slowly wean them off opioids. (That whole “pharma companies that caused this problem are now selling drugs to solve it”? Literally the least part of my worries. Buprenorphine saves lives and should have been routinely available to begin with.)
Also addicts that are just addicts without chronic pain still deserve to be treated like humans too
Yes! Although honestly longterm addicts overwhelmingly have brain conditions rooted in early childhood toxic stress and trauma that means their brains basically aren’t able to self-soothe and self-regulate (abilities that drug use further atrophies), so they’re constantly marinating in the neurotransmitters that communicate “pain”. Even when nothing’s “physically wrong” with them.
Now, there are different KINDS of drugs that are better or worse for helping them live happy lives—opioids have some massive drawbacks so it might be better for their longterm health to find something different—but it’s not as though addicts without Chronic Pain™️ aren’t actually in chronic pain or don’t have conditions that non-negotiably need treatment.
So it’s all kind of uh… yeah. We need to stop criminalizing addiction and treat addicts like human beings and get them the healthcare they need, which ISN’T a 12-step group and Finding Jesus and “being clean.” We need it desperately.
Yeah @star-anise touches on an important note that is not talked about much - our model for addiction is completely wrong. The reason we don’t correct it is because our opioid epidemic is essentially an indictment of our entire system. Trauma that often results in addiction is baked into our society. The opioid epidemic is directly the result of capitalism, and it will continue to take lives until capitalism is abolished and replaced with a system that prioritizes human dignity and not greed.
this fourth of july think of the indigenous people of america who had their country and land stolen from them with little to no reparations or apologies. land is still being taken. sacred grounds are still being ripped away. there is no “independence” for the people who were here first.
Y'all remember when Lin Manuel Miranda wrote a musical where a white cop sets up a Hispanic boy with a good record and zero experience with drugs to be caught with marijuana when trying to win her over because she asks and manipulated him into giving it to her? And how we’re supposed to feel sorry for this woman because she regrets tricking and ruining a child’s life and college admission just because she sings that she’s sorry? How people ate that shit up because it was the shortest play in Broadway? And y'all are still excited to give this man and Disney your money and would die on a hill defending why a musical about white slave owners is good and revolutionary actually?
Yikes.
Miaranda doesn’t care about POC, immigrants, or how his politics impact them. He isn’t a poor Hispanic man who made it big with hard work and an example of the American Dream.
He’s a rick kid from an influential family capitalizing on the spectacle of inclusive and diverse theater while making it as palatable as possible to white, brainrot audiences.
the word lover is so infinitely soft. So universal. So timeless. Two girls with awkward, hungry hands. A boy and a girl in the dark. Two men in empty light. A marriage of 40 years. Letters over eons. Sappho’s poems. The corner of a mouth. Lovers, lovers, lovers.
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