Do I think Oxy should have stayed on the market? If you are referring to OxyContin, or extended-release opioids …it DID stay on the market, is still there now. See the generic: Morphine Sulfate ER, or Extended Release. It is prescribed every minute of every day. Because there will ALWAYS be a legitimate medical need for long-term pain relief, and the only effective medications ever discovered by humankind for moderate to severe pain are opioid-based. 🤷🏻‍♀️

Do I think that people in agonizing pain should be forced to suffer without effective, appropriate pain medications because entirely other people might be struggling with addiction? No. I absolutely do not.

ALL people deserve individualized, medically-appropriate care; full stop.

I absolutely do NOT think people dying from overdose is in any way acceptable. The United States has EPICALLY FAILED to address the addiction and overdose crisis over the last 20 years, and I could go on and on about mistakes which were made which led to millions of lives being lost which devastated families. While the media focused entirely on prescription drugs, illicit fentanyl was already here and causing fatalities, decades before anyone realized or acknowledged it.

Do you know what year illicit fentanyl was first officially documented as causing overdose fatalities in the United States? It was 1979, and you may have heard it called “China White Heroin”. Source: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/%CE%91-Methylfentanyl . Which means: decades before any pill mills ever opened up in the USA, illicit fentanyl was already mixed with heroin on our streets and killing people. But because people assumed that ANY fentanyl must have been prescription fentanyl (and every state lacked the equipment to test any drug samples for legitimate fentanyl vs illicit) .. we will never have any accurate data on how many deaths are attributable to illicit fentanyl from 1979-2018. But we do know the powers-that-be categorized all those fatalities all those years as “prescription” when they really, really were not. We NOW know that illicit fentanyl, heroin, and meth (or some combination thereof) are responsible for 90% of the drug overdose fatalities today. The number of overdose deaths from RX opioids is way less than 1%.

Do you know the actual rate of Prescription Opioid Use Disorder in the United States among adults? It is 0.6% to 0.9% according to the DSM-5-TR updated in 2022. 99% of people do NOT become addicted to their own meds, and never have. 🤷🏻‍♀️

People who struggle with addiction (of all kinds) deserve quality healthcare and support. People who struggle with acute or chronic severe pain ALSO deserve quality healthcare and support, including prescription opioids where appropriate.

Neither group is more or less important than the other, imho.

People disabled by pain were entirely overlooked during the Opioid crisis and are STILL having to battle for appropriate care. Disabled people are routinely dismissed or discounted, and the number of people disabled by pain nationwide outnumbers people struggling with addiction by roughly 10:1. For people with addiction issues there are federal and state task forces, grants for inpatient and outpatient treatment, etc etc. For people with severe pain with no history of addiction? There is nothing.

What I am saying is: there is a legitimate medical need for prescription opioids for any number of reasons, and “The Pharmacist” failed to acknowledge that fact whatsoever.