Our Lowest Priority Is People Who Are Suffering Terrible Chronic Pain
Maia Szalavitz writes in the WaPo about how patients in serious pain are shut out of the debate over presciption pain meds and aren't mentioned in the hyperventilating stories about the "opioid epidemic."

There seems to be a good deal of distortion and ignoring of the facts that's used to support the war on opioids. The people it ends up hurting are those who need them to live without suffering:

A review of the literature by the highly respected Cochrane Collaboration found that less than 1 percent of patients without a prior history of addiction become addicted during long-term opioid treatment for chronic pain. The review collected data from nearly 5,000 patients.

Here, too, the media can be one-sided. For example, reporting on a 2012 study which found that over 100 million Americans are afflicted with some kind of chronic pain, ABC News stated as fact that "Powerful painkillers like vicodin or percocet relieve pain but aren't intended to treat patients long-term." Some doctors certainly take that perspective -- but if it were the consensus in medicine, there wouldn't be enough data for a Cochrane Review on the issue, let alone one that tentatively concludes that such treatment can be effective.

Opioids are clearly a highly contentious subject and there are certainly cases where they are prescribed too readily and made too accessible for recreational use. But the data suggest that most of these opioids are not being prescribed for chronic pain patients. Otherwise, doctors themselves would be directly supplying a far larger proportion of the opioids used by addicts.

Policymakers and anti-addiction advocates now want to suppress opioid use, and to impose even greater restrictions on people who live with chronic pain. This isn't going to address the addiction and overdose problem. Studies are now showing that when opioids aren't as available and prices go up, addicts just switch back to street heroin. Pain patients, however, simply suffer. Their plight shouldn't be an afterthought and shouldn't be relegated to comments sections to stories that failed to consider their perspective. They are a crucial part of this story.