During recovery the surgeon advised me that this was going to be very painful and to "stay ahead of the pain" for a few days and sent me home with some Oxycodon or something similar. He was right, it hurt like hell once the block wore off but after a week or so I was able to control it with Extra Strength Tylenol. Problem was every visit they would ask about the pain and give me another script "just in case". I think I had one we never even filled.
I had my lower wisdom teeth extracted about a decade and a half ago. Afterwards, I was sent home with a big bottle of Oxycodone. For wisdom teeth. The doctor's office was surprised when I called back the next day and requested a scrip for something weaker, because that stuff was just
way to -ing strong for the small amount of pain I was experiencing.
Anyone familiar with Hasan Minhah's
Patriot Act program on Netflix? He had a great episode on the fentanyl crisis recently. A bit longer ago, NPR did an excellent overview of the general opiod problem, and the problem of fentanyl in particular.
What it ultimately comes down to is money. The pharmaceutical industry doesn't really care about pain, they care about selling drug, and they went about it very much like the street drug dealers do. They knew their product was addicting, and they
knowingly took advantage of that fact to increase sales. They
deliberately created a population of junkies, just like any back-alley pusher.
When the potent natural opiods like Oxycontin weren't doing it anymore, they started pushing the really potent synthetics like fentanyl. Fentanyl was created and approved originally and exclusively for late-stage cancer patients. Period. Then the industry lobbied very hard, spending tens of millions of dollars in the process, to get it approved for a much wider range of pain control, essentially putting it in the same category as Oxy and Hydrocodone, and prescribed nearly as frequently; despite being
100 times more potent than morphine (50 times more potent than heroin).
Fentanyl is now responsible for about two-thirds of all opiod overdose deaths, including roughly half of all prescription opiod overdoses. (That's what killed musician Tom Petty, an accidental overdose on legally-prescribed fentanyl, prescribed for his hip fracture.)
The medical industry is finally starting to wise up and crack down on fentanyl prescription, and manufacturers of opiods have been fined and sued for millions of dollars for their role in pushing opiods. But it's too little, too late. Fentanyl is cheap and easy to produce, and the extremely high potency makes it much easier to smuggle (lower volumes for the same dose means less bulk to conceal). As a result, cheap Chinese-manufactured fentanyl has flooded the black market and doesn't look to be going away anytime soon.
And if that's not bad enough, the FDA has recently approved a new drug, sufentanil (trade name Dsuvia), an opiod drug
10 times stronger than fentanyl; despite strong opposition and criticism. It was originally intended exclusively for military use, but that didn't last long. So far, it has only been approved for acute pain management in a hospital setting, much like fentanyl originally was. It's not available in retail pharmacies, but that is just likely a matter of time as drug companies push to increase sales of the still-patented drug.
Get ready for a whole new wave of addiction and death.
