I doubt anybody (or at least very few) is advocating a 180-degree paradigm shift where people can walk into Walgreens and buy whatever they want without a prescription. But you should understand the present situation WRT the current DEA scheduling scheme for opiates. Only the drug companies stand to gain from higher prices and increased demand. The 3rd unintended effect of that remarkably disingenuous move is that people now finding it too difficult to get their fix legitimately are turning to black market heroin in record numbers, while the pharma fat cats sit back raking in the revenue.
I surely get that. I answered the OP regarding OTC (or almost OTC) opiates.
As against full legalization of grass, which I totally support, opiates present different problems.
And pharma having to compete on price and convenience against street heroin is (admittedly twisted) sweet justice. I can imagine their marketing meetings. 
Good point. Sounds like big biz doing what it does best: putting its won interests first and being a huge dick.
Note that this was a big drug company promoting opiates via the medical establishment, which operates under a particular paradigm. So this is more or less the opposite of the situation I envision, in which people have the freedom to use these drugs but they aren’t being shoved down their throats by ignorant, credulous docs. (From what I’ve heard, opiates are usually a poor choice for long-term pain management, so the doc were just buying Purdue’s line of bull.)
I get it almost yearly. I get an annual bronchial cough that after four or five weeks, sends me to the doctor, where I get codeine, steroids, and antibiotics. I tend to wait four or five weeks to make sure it won’t clear on its own, its annual, so I have good records to support it, and its bad enough that I get to wear adult diapers because I can’t control my bladder when I cough.
Its always been covered and my doctor has never told me she’s had any issues.
(This year I ended up in the hospital with an infection from a laceration and ended up on IV steroids, antibiotics and opiates - seems to have knocked the bronchial infection right the hell out of me).
Not necessarily - the Swiss have an interesting approach. One article I read reported that since addiction is treated as a disease with government provided heroin distribution clinics, heroin is no longer a ‘cool’ drug. It just means you are sick have to visit a clinic twice a day.
This paragraph in particular shows that you do not understand the issue with opioids. Read this, please, from the US Dept. of Health and Human Services:
At least half of all deaths by opioid overdose in the US that year were from prescribed opioids. Prescribed. Legitimate big pharma manufactured drugs. Not something cooked up by Joe Horsecooker in his state of the art trailer home lab. Again I ask, how is easier access going to make that better? As always, cites trump opinion.
Oh, absolutely. The OD problem however has little to do with pain management. Treating chronic pain with opiates is a dead-end street, with the operative word being “dead.” But people just like to feel “good” and that is how they get started. Initial episodes involving pain treatment are long forgotten after the scenario morphs into an emotional and psychological maintenance roller-coaster by the time addicts are well into the addiction cycle. An ironic aspect of opiate addiction is how the physical addiction arising from withdrawal drives the craving, but it’s no longer about the original physical pain that got things started. Of course some of it comes from purely recreational experimenting that graduates to full blown heroin use, but the prescriptions come from only one place: Doctors.
Legalise the lot. You want heroin, oxytocin, vicodin, cocaine, whatever? Sure, here you go.
When we made opioids far, far easier to get legally by basically handing them out to anyone who complained of pain, we got over 14,000 deaths from those prescriptions per year. Now we’ve decided we don’t want that, so are making them harder to get.
You may want to buck that trend, but right now we as a nation are not going for it. A small subsection is clamoring for easier access, but the larger number, who previously had acquiesced to making them more available when told they were safe and effective for all kinds of pain (turned out that was not the case) now doesn’t want to do that any more.
I overdosed on oxytocin once. Woke up drenched in my own breast milk.
How many deaths and how much criminality is caused by having the current restrictions? One only has to look at the Prohibition era to see that de-restricting them would be the lesser of two evils.
Ban cars and you’d save many more lives.
I believe that they shouldn’t require even a prescription.
Is there more information on this? It seems counterintuitive. I imagine some of these are suicide attempts or people buying on the black market, but I’m curious how so many people with a regular prescription could accidently overdose.
My spouse has cancer.
As part of his at home pain management he was handed two bottles of opiate-based pills. Either one of those contained sufficient opiates to kill about 5 people all at once (based on listed quantities and some googling). So yeah, really easy to overdose if you’re careless, or you want to, or you’re just so desperate to kill that pain you keep taking pills to make it go away.
I don’t know why this is a hard concept for people to get. Hand people a bottle of opiate-based pills and what’s to stop them from taking too many?
LOTS of medications are handed out in potentially lethal quantities. Your average bottle of Tylenol is more than sufficient to kill a person and in fact accidental OD’s on acetaminophen is now the leading cause of sudden liver failure in North America.
According to my pain management doctor more people die from opiates than car accidents.
There are tons of links on the cited page, and literally hundreds of others in a basic Google search. Opiods are highly addictive and one can build up a tolerance to the affects. That combo is a recipe for OD.
That cite doesn’t really support the claim, precisely.
So the 46,471 figure is for *all *drug overdose deaths, not just opiates, and the “more than half” of deaths from opiates includes both prescribed painkillers and heroin in the tally.
This site claims there were 12,727 deaths in the United States from natural and semi-synthetic prescription opiates in 2015, which is still quite a lot, but less than half of the number of deaths from car accidents.
Moreover, there are a lot more painkillers than just opiates. OTC acetaminophen kills about 150 people a year - in overdoses - plus the long term liver damage death count. It causes more acute liver failure than alcohol - and of course the combination is a killer.
Nothing comes close to opiates in pain efficacy. They really are miracle drugs. Just too bad the side effects are so potentially disastrous.
There’s not an answer to my question on that page or a basic google search. But after wading through a lot of unhelpful sources, the best answer I could find was that people are ODing mostly on the time release opoids or mixing them with other drugs. Which doesn’t really advance your argument.
They are miracle drugs for severe acute pain and malignant pain. For chronic non-malignant pain they’re a hell of a trap far more often than not.