WHY WERE WE LIED TO BY THE MEDIA & OUR POLITICIANS?
THEY KNEW BACK IN 2009, that 78% of OxyContin abusers never received a Doctor's prescription for them and had purchased them illegally on the black market, as counterfeits.
Meanwhile, like a broken record, policymakers are intent on further reducing opioid prescriptions, as if that will do anything other than exacerbate matters.
Many dealers use pill presses to make counterfeit OxyContin or Vicodin pills and trick non-medical users into thinking they are buying the real thing.
That’s how Prince died. The singer/songwriter abused Vicodin. Records show he never got prescriptions from doctors.
He died from ingesting counterfeit Vicodin pills he obtained on the black market that turned out to be fentanyl.
Policymakers & the main stream media remain fixated on the false narrative that the overdose crisis is the result of doctors overprescribing opioids to their patients in pain.
Prince’s tragic death actually typifies what is really happening.
The overdose crisis has always been primarily due to non-medical users accessing drugs in the dangerous black market that results from drug prohibition. While some unethical and unscrupulous doctors used their medical degrees to disguise their drug dealing operations in the form of “pill mills,” these were extreme exceptions to how doctors practice medicine and have been largely eradicated.
Yet their behavior played into the false narrative to which misguided policymakers stubbornly cling.
The prescription cutdown has made many pain patients suffer needlessly and cruelly. Some have turned to suicide. Others access the black market for substitutes like heroin or fentanyl.
THEY KNEW BACK IN 2009, that 78% of OxyContin abusers never received a Doctor's prescription for them and had purchased them illegally on the black market, as counterfeits.
Meanwhile, like a broken record, policymakers are intent on further reducing opioid prescriptions, as if that will do anything other than exacerbate matters. Forcing Chronic Pain Patients to live in Hell and are committing suicide. And Physicians are leaving their practice or dropping patients.
Columbia University researchers last month found evidence that the present restrictive opioid policy is not lowering overdose rates, but merely pushing non-medical users to more dangerous drugs, making patients suffer in the process. This comes after two earlier studies came to similar conclusions.
Doctors and patients are the wrong targets. Until drug prohibition is recognized as the culprit, don’t expect the death rate to go down.
https://www.cincinnati.com/story/opinion/2018/06/08/opinion-fentanyl-floods-streets-dont-blame-doctors-patients/679133002/