To the editor:
I commend the Daily Journal for tackling the opioid crisis in a meaningful local way. It is a national epidemic of historic proportions. I’m a retired RN, and I have seen nothing like this since the AIDS epidemic in the 1980s. (Before that, it was polio in the 1950s.)
I think the drug companies have a lot to answer for, as it was their unrelenting push to, frankly, over-treat post-op and chronic pain 15 to 20 years ago, along with physicians who should have been more careful in their prescribing, who set the stage for the current epidemic. I remember, as I was working then.
“Pain is the fifth vital sign” became a mantra, and people came to expect to experience no pain. Post-op patients were often sent home with scripts for weeks, even a month of Oxycontin. Low back pain and other non-acute, chronic pain was too often inappropriately treated with opioids for months, even years on end.
Of course people became addicted. When it started becoming more difficult and expensive to obtain prescription opioids four to five years ago, people started turning to (apparently easy-to-obtain) heroin — and started dying.
That’s just my take on it. Thank you for devoting resources to this horrible problem and putting out there that addiction is an illness, not a lifestyle choice.
Margaret E. Jones
Indianapolis
