Reports: Prince was addicted to Percocet, had opioids on person and at home when he died

[Mister44]

@japhroaig

The newest to the stable, gabapentin, has been a life changer for pain. It doesn’t treat acute pain, but long term pain.

Pft. They kept wanting me to take that and more and more of it. I finally got off it. It just made me a zombie and I dont think it kept the pain in check at all. If it works for you, then right on. I wish it did for me.

[subextraordinaire]

Kitty was on it and he seemed to have that zombie-like effect. However, I imagine that dosage could be adjusted if we had decided to continue with treatment.

[Medievalist]

@MackReed

To understand how Big Pharma and one Mexican cartel have systematically destroyed an entire generation of Americans, read “Dreamland: The True Tale of America’s Opiate Epidemic” - an exceptional work of journalism by Sam Quiñones.

Thank you for the recommendation, I will read it. But you might want to read some of the comments on Amazon about that book - for example:

I have a daughter who has had severe pain since early childhood. She feels the negative attitudes of most medical and even nursing staff changing, elevating. Her illness is a recognized condition and lists pain as the chief symptom. The hoops she has had to jump through to obtain a triplicate prescription is degrading, time consuming, horribly expensive and increasingly depressing.

or

It is really disheartening how the medical establishment is treating those with chronic pain as ‘drug seekers’, we don’t want to get high…we want relief. If we denied pain relief to a suffering animal, there would be outcry at the cruelty of it. But if a human is in great pain and needs relief, we are drug seeking dopeheads?

or

Why would I WANT to take a medication that causes night vision issues, tinnutis, constipation and a myriad of other side effects??? Without it, I can barely crawl out of bed. The CPK blood test (measures systemic inflammation norm is 0-15…my LOWEST has been 67. Cant fake that. Im vegan, non smoker, non drinker and a very healthy weight. Ive done everything within my power to be healthy, but with my Ehlers pain is my daily companion. In fact, suicide in Ehler Danlos patients is quite high.

I’ve noticed that whenever well-moneyed interests talk about how prescription painkillers “systematically destroyed an entire generation of Americans” more than half of the “destruction” they are talking about was caused not by the drugs, or the patients, but by the government and by legalized bribery of physicians.

[kupfernigk]

@Medievalist

Well, I’d argue that they shouldn’t. Opiates are fantastic for severe pain but they have their drawbacks (such as addiction, obviously, but there are others). If a physician is prescribing drugs for “unhappiness”

I was actually responding to a comment by @Clifton “but painkiller addiction just is not a problem that happy people tend to have”; I wasn’t implying anything at all about the treatment of unhappiness.

[anon55609254]

@gadgetgirl02

Thing is, if it was from painkillers, or painkillers interacting with something else that was prescribed, it may well have been as a result of attempting self care.

Not to mention that as one ages (he was 57, right?), the body chemistry changes in ways we don’t fully understand. Could be what he (and/or his doctors) thought was a “safe” dose was getting to be on the edge of unsafe. At that point, anything could have pushed it into the danger zone; stress, exhaustion, and so on.

Sad! But I really hope we don’t start restricting these drugs even further.

[anon55609254]

Let’s not forget that “Pain is good for the soul.” (Other people’s souls, that is.)

Tell you what – show me my soul and you can beat it up, waterboard it, whatever. But give me the painkillers.

[stinkinbadgers]

This is just an enraging topic and I do not look forward to another deluge of “EPIDEMIC” (yet another annoying misuse of the word) screaming and propaganda from the usual places.

Destroying peoples’ livers for the crime of wanting to use nature’s best painkiller should be treated like a war crime.

@Mister44

Look, guys, I have documented proof of my leg being fucked up for over 15 years. Chronic pain isn’t in my head. I am not fishing for pills. I am not selling them. I am not even taking anything that hardcore.

Drug warriors will never give two shits about your pain. You’re considered acceptable collateral damage, if you’re even thought of at all. Far more important that someone somewhere find it to be slightly more difficult to get high.

[anon67050589]

Yup, that’s it. This is one of those situations where the words used by an average person have specific meanings in context.

[anon27822705]

@Medievalist

My new doctor is refusing to renew my prescriptions. She says that “pain management is not a family doctor’s job”.

Just this morning I heard on the news that this – exactly this – is happening with greater and greater frequency. Really sorry you have to go through this ultimately because others are irresponsible. I’m lucky enough that chronic pain is not part of my life (not yet at least) but I feel for you there.

[nungesser]

@lamaranagram

Just this morning I heard on the news that this – exactly this – is happening with greater and greater frequency.

It’s been an interesting shift over the last 10-15 years. When I worked at my first big job out of college with really amazingly comprehensive health benefits, the doctor my HMO chose for me would give me meds for anything like candy. She gave me packs of Ambien, clonazepam, and Zoloft “just to have on hand” when I mentioned that I occasionally had mild bouts of insomnia during particularly stressful periods of work. The family doctor I have now refuses to give me any sleep or pain medications at all, saying “the downside isn’t worth it.”

[Jamie_Anderson]

Percocet contains acetaminophen. So do most cold and flu tablets, so if he was suffering from the flu, as claimed, he may have been doubling up on acetaminophen and risking acetaminophen toxicity.

[IronEdithKidd]

Ugh. How do we stop this madness in the US? Single payer is way off in the distance.

[Max_Blancke]

You should save them. New guidelines are going to make them much harder to prescribe. My wife is a doc and has been getting new guidance on the subject, She used to say that there is no reason for a person in this country, in this age, to have to endure severe pain. That philosophy is changing, as a reaction to some people abusing painkillers. I had a period where I was in severe pain, and had to take some reasonably heavy painkillers. I cannot imagine having to go through that experience without the meds. But the priority in this country is fighting illegal drug use. If that means that a bunch of people have to endure excruciating chronic pain, that is apparently a small price to pay. I guess they will feel differently when Grandma hangs herself because she can’t take the agony for one more minute.

[d_r]

@Max_Blancke

You should save them.

I do, but wish I had more; When I have a medical or dental issues there is usually a couple of days between when pain starts getting bad and when I can see the doctor or dentist. I also cut the dose way down, because I’ve decided that a little pain and a clear head is better than no pain and unwanted euphoria.

[Max_Blancke]

Never take more than the minimum to make the pain survivable. First, because one quickly needs more to achieve the same effect. Secondly, it is a zero-sum issue. If you take more than necessary to dull the pain, that euphoria will always be followed by an equivalent low. The good news is that even after developing a little tolerance, a couple of weeks without taking any can reset you back to zero.

I had a serious back injury that was finally solved with surgery. But for a while, the pain would show up unpredictably. Often it would hit at night, and it would take about an hour for the pills to kick in. during that hour, the pain level would increase steadily. I often ended up walking barefoot and rubbing or clapping my hands to try to divert some of the pain with other sensory input. Anyway, I spent about a year living with sudden unpredictable onsets of horrific pain. I always had to keep pills with me. All that is long behind me. But When my wife talks about having to give some of her serious pain patents three days of pills, or just giving them OTC painkillers, I find it very concerning. I do not believe that I could have endured what I went through without the chemical help that I had available to me. I understand the concern with misuse and addiction, but I am much more concerned with what will happen if I, or a family member, ever has to deal with that level of pain in the future.

[IronEdithKidd]

I’m clearly some mutant who gets no euphoria from opioids. They only kinda work for me sometimes, but only if I see trails and immediately go to bed.

I’m also witnessing the crack-down in the US from a second hand view. My son’s grandma lives in chronic pain, but has had her opioid prescriptions nearly cut off in the last couple years. I fear she’ll give in to heroin dealers sooner than later.

[Wanderfound]

@kupfernigk

Isn’t overprescribing of opiates the real cause of the problem? There are an awful lot of unhappy people in the world but most of them don’t get opiates. Controlling personalities, on the other hand, seem to be a bit prone to addiction.
The ratio of effective to dangerous dosage for opiates is extremely low. In terms of that ratio, cannabis is probably the safest of all drugs - it is extremely hard to kill yourself with the stuff.

Actually, no. Compared to most analgesics, the therapeutic index of the opiates is remarkably high.

They’re much safer than barbiturates, paracetamol or aspirin, for example. And, whereas a lethal paracetamol overdose involves a lengthy period of extreme agony, an opiate overdose is subjectively experienced as a heavily-stoned nap that never ends.

This relative safety does contribute to the addiction risk, and the tendency for them to be tightly regulated. Paracetamol, for example, is freely available not because it’s safe, but because it is too dangerous for recreational use.

Addiction is nearly always a symptom as much as it is a disease. I’ve known quite a few heroin addicts in my time, and pretty much all of them were rape and abuse survivors. The exceptions tended to be mentally ill or on the autism spectrum.

[kupfernigk]

@Wanderfound

They’re much safer than barbiturates, paracetamol or aspirin, for example.

That doesn’t exactly invalidate the point I was making about finding more effective, less addictive and safer analgesics. You kind of make my point because these drugs are all very, very old. Where are the more modern, safer alternatives?

[Wanderfound]

@kupfernigk

@Wanderfound

They’re much safer than barbiturates, paracetamol or aspirin, for example.

That doesn’t exactly invalidate the point I was making about finding more effective, less addictive and safer analgesics. You kind of make my point because these drugs are all very, very old. Where are the more modern, safer alternatives?

There aren’t any. We have a handful of synthetic opioids that match or exceed the naturally-derived opiates in effectiveness (e.g. Fentanyl), but those aren’t safer, just stronger.

That is rather my point; drug development is astonishingly difficult, and naturally-occuring opiates are already exceptionally good at what they do. They really are amongst the most effective and least dangerous of the naturally-occuring pharmacopeia.

Cannabis, as useful and enjoyable as it may be, just isn’t in the running in the serious analgesic game. A spliff may help you to be a bit less irritated when your arthritis is playing up, but it ain’t gonna do shit when you’re dealing with the sorts of pain involved with, for example, recovering from abdominal surgery. Serious pain requires serious drugs, and risk scales with efficacy.

[Schmorgluck]

@nungesser

She gave me packs of Ambien, clonazepam, and Zoloft “just to have on hand” when I mentioned that I occasionally had mild bouts of insomnia during particularly stressful periods of work.

That’s fucking messed up. I don’t know about Ambien and clonazepam, but I’m quite familiar with Zoloft (aka sertraline) which I’ve been prescribed for chronic depression and, later, for my social anxiety disorder (the core cause of my depression, as it turned out - two birds with one stone, as a result). And one thing is for certain, it’s that you don’t take this molecule casually. Not that it has severe side effects, not in most cases anyway, but it has plenty of them, some being at least annoying (in my case, random yawning, mild tremors, and anorgasmia), and more importantly the benefits of taking it can only come in the long run. So basically taking it casually only gets you the side effects without any of the benefits. Talk about an awful deal.

Conversely, once my anxiety issues were diagnosed, I’ve been prescribed alprazolam (better known as xanax - an anxiolytic) for my anxieties as a transitional treatment, along with sertraline, in order to wait for the latter’s benefits to appear, and in order to manage peaks of anxiety.

All those, by the way, have been prescribed by a psychiatrist. General practitioners can theoretically prescribe those in France, and maybe some do, but it’s my understanding that most of them abstain, leaving it to the specialists. They limit themselves to renewing existing prescriptions, and to keeping an eye on side-effects, especially non-obvious ones (sertraline, for example, can cause a deficit in sodium).