Recovery Officials Wary of DEA Cutback on Opioids
(ABC 6 News) – The Drug Enforcement Agency has announced they will decrease opioid production dramatically over the next year.
They announced they will be capping the production of drugs like Vicodin, OxyContin and Demerol by 25% in 2017. The DEA says they hope to control the supply of drugs, and keep it out of the hands of people who abuse them.
However, some say this could only make things worse.
“It could backfire on us dramatically if all of a sudden, this guy that’s got ongoing chronic pain can’t get at it. What’s your alternative? You gonna live in pain? Or you gonna do something about it?” said Minnesota Adult & Teen Challenge’s Tom Truszinski.
“The people that need them are going take them and if they have to take more, they’re going to take more,” added Recovery Coach Adam Thomas. “Then the doctors are going have to prescribe more prescriptions and, you know, I hope they don’t end up going to heroin because that’ll kill them.”
Thomas says his addiction to prescription drugs, as well as many others, brought him to the point of breaking the law.
“I remember one time I broke into this one house, and there was prescription drugs in the cabinet, and I just took the drugs and didn’t really care about nothing else,” said Thomas.
On average, 50 to 75 percent of the men who walk through the doors of Minnesota Adult & Teen Challenge in Rochester will have some sort of addiction to prescription drugs.
For Truszinski, he believes a pain management plan between the patient and the physician is a better alternative than capping the production.
“In a perfect world, I think the physician taking the time to appropriately and properly prescribe the medication, depending on a person’s size, their metabolism, their pain levels and their needs,” he said.
A national survey on drug use last year found that every month 6.5 million Americans over the age of 12 used drugs that were not prescribed to them. In fact, prescription drugs were more widely abused than cocaine, heroin and hallucinogens combined.
Filed under: General Problems
Some one has put a lot of money in their hands. They are not doing this because they care about people.
Someone will blow the whistle on them just watch they are going to get caught.
The DEA is creating public health crises with every move they make, rather than preventing them as they claim to do. If they restrict availability of prescription opiates, and then ban kratom, what do they believe will happen? Heroin – inexpensive and always available – will become the obvious option. Are they truly that stupid? Or are they trying to kill people?
How many of the drugs abused are not for pain? The last 5 surveys that I read did not differentiate in the types of drugs abused unless they actually did the proper tracking of the respondes.
Are we gonna try and cure diabetes by cutting back on insulin?