Is a medication prescribed to a patient that can use it at will the best our medical profession can provide to people who are in pain? While drugs like Oxycontin, OxyNEO, and Percocet may address the immediate physical ailment, but what about the emotional and mental changes a person in chronic pain has to deal with? Seeing a psychiatrist or other MD for 15 minutes to make sure that a prescription is doing what it is supposed to be doing does nothing to assure the patient that they are on the road to recovery. There are no instructions provided with the prescription helping the patient avoid addicted and no real accountability outside of their own home to insure appropriate dosage and use.
In provinces like Ontario where there were more opioid related deaths than deaths from automobile accidents, authorities have been asking for a more real solution to the steady climb in street use over the past several years. The seemingly most effective and aggressive attempt made thus far was made in 2012 when Canada banned the selling of Oxycontin and replaced the highly addictive prescription with a slow release, tamper resistant OxyNEO that cannot be as easily crushed, snorted, or injected. However, with the lack of availability of the more powerful predecessor, heroin sales are through the roof- one source noted that Canada’s main supplier of heroin, Afghanistan, has increased production by 15 times, indicating that the cheaper, more accessible street drug is just as dangerous and is capable of negating Canada’s tighter restrictions as statistics are not showing the intended decline.
Just this side of our northern border, however, in a city near Detroit, MI physicians have developed and opened an inpatient treatment facility known as a rapid detox center in which anyone who has overdosed on opiates is kept sedated until the detoxing side effects have passed and the patient can “wake up” on the other side. It’s encouraging to see alternative options for addicts to recover, but is any amount of anti-overdose medication like Narcan or detox facilities enough to keep an opiate addict clean and sober?
Lead singer of Aerosmith, Steven Tyler, claimed that the only way he, as a recovering addict, could stay sober was because of the consistency in which he attended AA meetings; “If it wasn’t for AA, I would have nothing. If you stop going to AA meetings, you’re going to wind up using again.”
Maybe new drugs and treatment centers will be great for the life expectancy of heroin addicts, but for them to gain a quality of life back, the tried and true method of working the 12 steps is probably always going to be the most effective course of action. An addict’s pain, physical or emotional, won’t stop until it can be managed without the use of drugs, prescription or street.
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