While I usually am not one to scream “racism” I detect a note of treating opioid abusers as victims. See Opioid Addiction: Signs & Treatment. Crack users, perceived to usually be people of minority races, are perceived very differently. I think that doctors that feed addictions should be treated as pushers. People who need pain relief should be able to get it without a “five pill” restriction. But time to call doctors to task, criminally, for running pain reliever mills.
Right or wrong I would think at least part of it has to do with the fact that opioids have a legitimate use in modern medicine, and are very commonly prescribed. Crack on the other hand not so much, and Opiod use has been increasing exponentially, while Crack use isn’t nearly as common.
I can think of a few other reasons opioid addicts are treated differently that have nothing to do with race.
The doctors didn’t know how addictive the drugs were. Many doctors were victims of the advertising too. (Of course, some doctors really did “push pills”. I don’t think many did.)
There’s an element of “victim-blaming” when dealing with illegal drug addiction. I suspect most users of illegal addictive drugs started as teenagers because they wanted to “party” or were curious or bored or something along those lines. While not yet adults, they were told this was illegal and addictive, and not to use drugs… and they went ahead and did it anyway before they were addicted. So the addiction is often seen as their fault. It’s a lot harder to blame someone who suffered an injury and needed pain relief, and was told by their doctor they need to take so much of the legal drug, which really was treating their pain… and is now addicted.
You really don’t need to compare crack to opiates, you can just compare Rx opiates with heroin. When heroin is being abused by outgroup members (Chinese laborers, blacks in the ghetto, musicians and bohemians) then people support draconian policing. But now that opiate addiction has become a huge problem in the white rural areas, people want compassion and better police training.
However, I don’t think that alone is it because I don’t recall these attitudes towards the meth epidemic which also affects the same people (whites in rural areas were heavily affected by meth).
So maybe there is something to the fact that opiates are Rx medications, not street drugs. I don’t know.
Oxycodone (Oxcontin trade name) is the trigger for this witch hunt.
Heroin and Crack are “black thangs” and were ignored.
When the white folks started getting addicted and dying in large numbers, the DEA suddenly realized there was an “Opioid Crisis” and every clinic in the country stopped providing opioids to their patients.
If you are working in a clinic, you are not a well-respected Medical Professional.
It takes guts (and career security) to tell the DEAL “I am the Doctor, this is my patient. You do not tell ME how to treat my patients”.
I am now running on the pain pills I did NOT take. The ones I did take caused Acute Renal Failure. Had I taken all of them, I doubt I would have survived.
As it is, my little remaining kidney function is badly compromised.
Those damned pills may kill me yet.
As it is, the clinic will no longer provide adequate pain or sleep meds.
Yes, my medical profile is downright scary.
Dependent on both opioids and benzodiazepines.
Stage 4 - it was a solid Stage 3 prior to the acute attack - CKD (kidney failure).
I think a better comparison than crack vs. opioids is crack vs. meth. Meth also has no legitimate medical uses, is perceived as a lower-class drug affecting mostly white people, and yet the sentencing guidelines are the same as crack and I don’t see a lot more compassion aimed at meth heads vs. crack heads.
The extent of the problem is much different the number of people who died from cocaine or crack overdose peaked around 4,000 in 2004. The number of people who die from opiod overdose is over 35,000 a year now.
Doctors could get sued for malpractice for not prescribing these drugs and one of the symptoms of opiate withdrawal is increased sensitivity to pain. Combined that led to lots of doctors overprescribing opiates to patients and lots of new addicts.
There is an increase. Well, sort of an increase, and not the whole story either. The number of people with work related or work preventing injuries is way up. Of course the population is much larger also and I don’t if we can accurately assess this problem statistically. But there is a significant percentage of this problem that results from people using painkillers to keep working because they can’t support themselves and their families based on disability benefits available. This is a contributory factor in a larger problem. I have no doubt that much of the opioid abuse is the same as with other drugs, people just want to get high. Back when it was morphine and heroin things started the same way. The big difference here is the drug companies flooding the market with legally produced drugs and doctors stuck in a bind between serving patients that were in pain and had no alternatives. And as usual, the moralist politics makes the problem worse by driving it underground at the demand end. This time however they’ve done little to look at the supply end at all because it’s legal, even though they’ve always been ineffective at dealing with that with illegally produced drugs.
I fail to see the logic behind targeting drug companies for “flooding the market” with drugs. Decreasing the supply of legal drugs would drive more addicts to illegal drugs and also increase the price. This would exacerbate the problems that most addicts have, namely acquiring safe drugs at a low cost.
No. This would indeed place the OP on the left of most Democrats. Most Democrats are vicious towards drug addicts and have been for quite some time. Just in this case, the “left-wing” position makes sense.
Some of that is true because the horses have already left the barn. Some more is true because we’re not going to get treatment for addicts who would benefit from it and let the rest die. But allowing drug companies to produce more doses of drugs that are needed, and more addictive forms of those drugs will just make the problem worse.
the people who have to deal with drug addiction on a daily basis (counselors, emergency responders, public aid workers, public attorneys, etc) have long advocated policies that don’t blame the victim for their addictions, but since this was a problem mostly associated with lower class people (of all races) it didn’t get much traction. Now that the problem is moving into middle and upper class territory you’re getting the attention of the people who actually make the policies on how we as society are to deal with people who have addictions. So, yes, the opiod addiction epidemic is responsible in part for our changing attitude as a society towards people with drug addictions, but it’s more of a class issue than a race issue. And, yes, I realize that class and race are inextricably linked in our society.
As far as I’m concerned, this is a good shift in public perception - addicts are not criminals - and how we got here is less important.
Gimme a couple vicodins and I’m straight. What I don’t understand are these new super-opioids the drug companies keep introducing to the market. Do we really need painkillers 50X stronger than oxycontin (an already super-potent and addicting painkiller)?
I was diagnosed with osteoarthritis i n 2005.
The type of arthritis is important - the osteo- variant is the destruction of the cartilage separating the bones in a joint. The result is bone-on-bone pain.
Run that by your doctor. It is truly breathtaking.
Vicodin used to work, Then Dilaudid used to work. We tried massive doses of Morphine. Worked but destroyed the little kidney function I had left.
Now on Fentanyl - a truly scary opioid. This is in a trans-dermal formulation, so avoids the peaks of oral drugs.