#Opiate Epidemic

[creekfiend]

I used to get an arguments on facebook and it bit me in the ass enormously because it turns out that when you get an arguments on facebook habitually, you'll be interacting with a lot of other people who get an arguments on facebook habitually, and most of these people are deeply unpleasant and they will be super mean to you in really fucked up ways. so for a couple of years I just sort of dropped off ever interacting with anyone who said things that I did not agree with. I would just scroll past stuff or I would get upset about it privately and move on. I did not ever engage. and the last couple of weeks I've started being able to say things in response to things I don't agree with in ways that I feel lay out what my perspective is but do not get overly invested in "winning" or "proving" anything -- I will say my piece generally for the benefit of other people who might be reading the conversation and need to hear what I have to say. and then I will turn notifications off and go do something else.

anyway. wow. y'all heard about this? pretty cool shit.

[saint-logan-makes-art]

“Harm Reduction Kitty”

Public Health Campaign

Graphic Design

[doggogills-but-worse]

the opiate epidemic was a statistical error. the average person takes 0 opiates each year. Gregory House, who works at PPTH and takes 5 Vicodin per hour is an outlier and should not have been counted.

[deramin2]

People often treat The Killers as a meme for their bombastic pop songs with weird premises, and panned Sam's Town when it came out. But the older they get the more they focus on how the boredom of small towns crushes ambitions and drives people to substance abuse and hurting each other. Pressure Machine (2022) is one of the most beautiful and soul crushing depictions of the opiate epidemic told through interviews and songs. The longer they stand in the bright lights of big cities that feed on people, the more they look to the people who see that light across the desert like Gatsby driven mad by the green light across the water.

[georgiapeach30513]

RE: Red One.

It’s funny how critics and people online continue to want to keep this film down, but I think it’s continuing to exceed expectations which is a good sign.

I had a feeling for a long while it was going to surprise people, given how many were complaining nonstop about Chris’s involvement.

Also, the discourse about his career choices… 🙄🙄🙄🙄🙄

It’s one thing if he were to sit there and complain to the media about not being able to find more serious roles or prestige movies to do.

But to my knowledge he’s never done that? I can only think of him saying years ago that his good films he feels nobody watches (true, or at least not ENOUGH people watch) but even then it wasn’t so much a complaint as a response to a question.

It seems like he is having fun and just picking what he wants to do. I’ve never heard him say “I only did this because I couldn’t get that.” He’s thrown out there he did Red One because he’s always wanted a Christmas film and there was a part for someone like him in it. Makes sense to me. And he just did three smaller scale lower profile projects with directors that are still establishing themselves. Without his and Anya’s involvement, don’t know that sacrifice would have been able to get made. I wish critics who aren’t up to date with his career move at least stop talking and wait for developments over a “hot take” for hits.

I saw a ridiculous tweet once again undermining Red One and his choices. Here’s the thing…red one was an orignal IP. It was a new story that wasn’t from an existing franchise, show, book, or sequel. Lots of people worked on that film and Amazon giving it a theatrical release also helps those who worked on the film that aren’t DJ or the rest of the cast. People who are seeing it in theaters are helping to create box office return and if films like this did well and were received well, maybe there would be more studios willing to take a chance on an original take over an existing IP.

Just because it’s a popcorn movie with silliness does not mean it’s trash and only films like Oppenheimer can be considered art.

I really despise that take and how some cinephiles look down on these films yet solely up lift Oscar bait films.

It bothers me immensely as a creative myself because in my opinion, movies are entertainment and they’re supposed to entertain you. If you and others have fun with the content and enjoy, have a good laugh, a smile, a cry, then I think the creators have done their job. Not all films need to be awards worthy, and art is subjective.

Ahh, the discourse on Chris' career is a tale as old as time at this moment. According to some he will never be good enough or rise to his potential. According to some he is a washed up has been, and yet they can't seem to quit him. I think that makes him a bit more powerful than they want him to be. But alas, we're all free to spend our time how we see fit.

It's funny because I don't think some people realize the roles that he was considered for, the roles he turned down, the roles that he was wanted for. Back when Running Man was in talks, he was top of the list as the lead, and we see that he wanted Sacrifice instead. I think that was a better choice, because quite frankly I'm getting fatigued at all the remakes, but some people want to make their career out of remakes. To each their own.

Unfortunately Chris outside of the MCU has never been quite as a box office draw. A lot of his movies, well most, are on a smaller scale. I think people are looking at his last three movies; Ghosted, Pain Hustlers, and Red One, and immediately jumping on a hate bandwagon. Let's break this down, Ghosted was a small movie, and judging by the synopsis I think we got what we were promised. I think that Dex, Chris, and Ana all were making different movies.

Pain Hustlers will mostly be forgotten. It was part of the opiate epidemic movies that became oversaturated. It didn't have any promotion, and compared to the other projects in the opiate crisis genre, it wasn't that great. I still will die on the hill that his performance was solid, and the best in the movie. Emily was oddly terrible.

Red One I think surprised a lot of people. Nobody expected it to be as fun or as good as it ended up being. Due to the strike, Chris didn't get to really film last year, minus the Deadpool movie. Had R1 not be released a year late, he would have only had Deadpool for this year. Starting next year we're going to have another surge of his projects, and they all seem different, so maybe people should just be patient.

The average movie goer wants to be entertained. That's why popcorn flicks make more money than the award movies. now sometimes you can have both. But anyways.

[mezmer]

Actually would be easy to end the opioid epidemic if opium was normalized. I'm just like why do people even suffer. What's the point of a highly concentrated opiate when God made it perfect already

[firsttarotreader]

Because people are uncultured and dumb and they don’t know that AIDS was a huge problem during the 80’s and 90’s no matter your sexual orientation. You could get it by blood donations. Many women caught it because their husbands gave it to them. Many straight men caught it for fucking loads of women with no protection. An AIDS event is not something “queer” per se. Everyone was affected by it, not just queer people. // The AIDS epidemic came up during the height of the crack cocaine and opiate epidemic in the '80s and the heroin epidemic in the 90s. a lot of straight people got AIDS too because of sharing dirty needles when they were trying to get high. The people who do not acknowledge this and just make it a queer thing shows their privilege, their foreign mindset, and their age because this stupid new generation knows nothing of that time.

And I know it affected queer people a lot too, but it was a huge thing for everyone.

[ruffianbandwidth]

Greetings y'all! I know it's been a while, and I apologize for the lack of posts about music (check out Cameron Winter's new solo album "Heavy Metal" if you haven't already. He sounds like beautifully discordant and spastically sonorous Gen-z Bill Callahan). Life has a way of forcing you into adulthood, despite your best efforts to avoid it, and pretty soon you're left having to prioritize certain things over others (and sadly blogging about music for free was one of those things that had to fall to the wayside). However, if you enjoyed my posts, and dare I say my writings, then you might be happy to know that I wasn't just growing old and selling out. I was actually pursuing other creative pursuits all these years of absence - including writing. In fact, that's the reason I'm here posting, because I finally self-published one of the books I wrote a few years back (because unfortunately it is once again relevant). It is available as both an eBook and a paperback here and I would really appreciate your support!

Here's some more info on the book (in case the title is too off-putting lol):

Make Armstrong Great Again was originally written during 2017-2019, and was inspired by the fact that I was teaching high school at the time. Being part of a high school campus as an adult feels like you're an anthropologist doing field work. It is as joyous and beautiful, as it is terrifying and confusing. You can't help but marvel at the rawness of that age. The passion, emotion, apathy, and authenticity constantly churning throughout. It is a land of contradictions. All of it hanging together by a thread, or rather the thin facade of order, tradition, and consequence.

Post-2016, I saw and felt a lot of parallels between a high school campus and our political reality. Here was the US, the global hegemon, and purported democratic beacon and moral compass of the world, coming to terms with the fact that our political institutions were nothing but a facade based upon crumbling notions of propriety, fairness, and consequence. All of which was meant to cover, obscure, and mystify our underlying economic/social reality.

Now I'm not one to subscribe to the "Great Man" theory of history. I think everyone, regardless of the power they wield, is more or less a prisoner to our underlying social/economic systems, and therefore confined to a limited range of actions and possibilities. However, I do think that every now and then, certain historical figures happen to resonate with a moment, and therefore have a little more latitude in their ability to actually respond to systems and shape reality.

Sadly, I believe Trump is one of these figures. The combination of his wealth, social capital, and personality allowed him to embody the moment, which in turn led to him (consciously or unconsciously) recognizing and breaking through the thin facade of our political order. In doing so, he forced everyone else to recognize the facade and stare into the abyss, and ever since that realization we have all been collectively going insane, trying to channel or numb all of our anger, fear, and desperation.

Whether its class de-alignement, Qanon, cottage-core fantasies, Russia-gate, clinging to empty institutions, compensatory nationalism, opiate epidemics, pointless impeachments, our ever-expanding forms of spectacle and entertainment, the circular firing squads of the left, more and more blatant racism and anti-LGBTQI+ sentiment, or just a general sense of nihilistic doom, we have all been trying to come to terms with the fact that reality no longer has any safe guards or guarantees.

This is terrifying (but also potentially liberating), and since the levers of politics are completely controlled by moneyed interests (and therefore out of our reach), all of us are incredibly alienated and have no meaningful form of social organization, and we are up against the ticking clock of ecological destruction, we end up turning on each other and using the most vulnerable as scapegoats. We do this because it's easy, and because attacking and blaming symptoms seems like the only option available. We are all so busy, tired, atomized, and disempowered that we can barely imagine, let alone muster up the will, sacrifice, and wherewithal to do what is hard and organize so that we can actually struggle against the root material causes of our misery. And so instead, out of sheer desperation, we direct all of our energy, focus, and emotion into chasing the phantoms and ghosts of a culture war. Suffocating more and more in the process, and growing more insane all the while.

Anyway, all of this is to say, imagining our politics in the context of a high school was strangely illuminating. On the one hand, it is incredibly fitting. And yet, at the same time, it feels completely out of place and exaggerated even amongst oft lambasted and demonized hormone-addled teenagers. Situating our politics in the context of a high school somehow managed to highlight its absurdity all the more. The plot of this book seems fully fictional, and yet it's the context of our very real, and very adult, reality. In fact, much of the tweets and debate/speech dialogue used throughout are direct quotes from the 2016 campaign (with some necessary contextual changes). And of course, perhaps most absurd of all, the ultimate result of it all is the same.

That's the book. In all its entertaining, infuriating, and devastating glory. No one escapes unscathed. It's different from my usual style, but it was nice to take a break from my more "conceptual" work and practice writing in a different way (though for better or worse my verbose and overwrought philosophizing still finds its way into the novel). Anyway, if you want a copy, it is now available both as an ebook and a physical paperback via the link in my bio. Hopefully it provides some sort of catharsis as we buckle up for these next four years.

[yourdailykitsch]

Taylor Kitsch Says Signing onto ‘Painkiller’ with Pete Berg Was a ‘No-Brainer’

The Friday Night Lights alum digs deep to play a man addicted to opioids in the new limited series.

For Taylor Kitsch, joining the cast of the scripted limited series Painkiller was a “no-brainer” for several personal reasons. One, it was another chance to collaborate with showrunner Pete Berg, who worked with Kitsch on his breakout role as Tim Riggins in the 2006 football drama Friday Night Lights.

“He’s like an older brother to me,” Kitsch said of Berg on the set of Painkiller in early 2022, prior to the SAG-AFTRA strike. “We’ve been through a lot, and when I got this call, it was quite simple, to be honest.” After Friday Night Lights, Kitsch and Berg teamed up on the 2012 blockbuster Battleship and again on 2013’s Lone Survivor. “You already have that trust,” said Kitsch, “and the shorthand is really important as well.”

That trust was necessary in grappling with the heavy subject matter of Painkiller, a fictionalized retelling of some of the origins of the opioid epidemic that is believed to have caused over 300,000 American overdose deaths over the last two decades. The six-episode series hones in on an ensemble of characters to tell a broader story: Richard Sackler (Matthew Broderick), the billionaire senior executive at Purdue Pharma who pushes the wide distribution of opiates for profit; Edie Flowers (Uzo Aduba), an investigator at the US Attorney’s office who chases down answers about OxyContin; Shannon Schaeffer (West Duchovny), a recent college grad who’s recruited to Purdue to sell the drugs directly to doctors; and Glen Kryger (Kitsch), a mechanic who, after getting injured on the job, is prescribed OxyContin, which traps him in a vicious cycle of addiction.

Although Glen is a wholly fictional character, he’s the series’ main face of OxyContin’s devastating effects — another reason why Kitsch felt a personal responsibility in portraying Glen’s struggle. Kitsch has watched people close to him fight addiction. “Man, it’s pretty close to me, this thing,” he said. “Unfortunately, I think we’re all one degree away from someone who’s an addict.”

Authentically capturing Glen’s attempts at detoxing as he hides the seriousness of his addiction from his wife Lily (Carolina Bartczak) and stepson Tyler (Jack Mulhern) required some creative risk-taking from both Kitsch and Berg. Berg’s directing style, which Kitsch knows well, is dynamic and at times improvisational to keep the performances raw and real. “Sometimes he tries to get you out of your own head or your own way,” said Kitsch. “You don’t get faulted for mistakes — he just pushes you left or right. He keeps the set very alive and you move quick.”

The conversation about the opioid epidemic is far from over, as everyone involved in Painkiller understands, and Kitsch hopes his portrayal of Glen helps continue the conversation and remove some of the stigma and shame about addiction. “I’m very lucky to have served a lot of true stories and heavy things,” said Kitsch. “And this is right up there for me in the sense of purpose, of why I get to do what I do.”

Painkiller is now streaming on Netflix.

[gravitysgone]

They're taking an OD death out of the park across the street. And it's just terribly sad. Because no one bats an eye around here anymore. Maybe if people cared more and connected more we'd not have to numb ourselves to the opiate epidemic.

[narcan-necromancer]

My friend died and I cried for what felt like hours with my friend. Fuck the opiate epidemic. Fuck the monster that I have to drag around with me every moment of everyday whispering in my ear and telling me about the bliss and divine serenity that's just one score away and how heavy it is to carry around. I hate this. I hate seeing people I care about drop dead because we're so lost and in so much pain that even temporary peace that destroys and kills us is better than living through this painful existence without it. Fuck the Sacklers. Fuck the system that looks down on us and takes away our humanity by treating us like throwaway walking corpses because we're just 'junkies'. We're hurting. We're falling apart. We need love and support. We need friends and a support network. We're people.

[apenitentialprayer]

Soviet Union: The Early Persecutions

Soviet society clearly contained numerous incentives to relinquish religious belief and membership. First and foremost, the costs of religious belief and membership were extremely high because, in many instances, religious individuals could be executed or sentenced to decades of hard labor. Religious groups were the victims of extreme violence immediately following the 1917 Russian Revolution. In the Civil War that followed the Revolution, Bolsheviks targeted Orthodox churches, monasteries, and clerics as potential sources of anti-religious [sic?] activity. Church property was seized and religious leaders, monks, and nuns were often killed in the process. The terror of the Civil War sometimes spun out of control as murderous gangs took advantage of the melee: "in many cases the tortures, murders, and vandalism were the autonomous initiative of local anarchistic bands of army and naval deserters calling themselves Bolsheviks." More systematic religious persecution began in the 1930s and reemerged periodically according to the whims of Soviet leadership. Anti-religious propaganda grew in the 1920s but the unfavorable results of the 1937 census marked a turning point in Soviet religious policy. Because religion was thought to be the result of social inequality and an opiate of the oppressed masses, the League of Militant Atheists was in a bind to explain the endurance of religion within a socialist utopia. Therefore, "they made a tactical move of proclaiming religion as a cause and not merely a symptom of social problems . . . religious practices became the scapegoat of the Soviet ideological machine, they became the only readily admissible reason for the failure of the complete re-education of the masses." According to this argument, Communist society did not secularize because religious believers prevented communism from attaining perfect social justice, which, in turn, would effortlessly secularize society. To end this cycle of religion, Yaroslavsky declared that "several hundred reactionary zealots of religion" needed to be exterminated. In addition to liquidating religious advocates, the Soviets also promoted religious ignorance. A common tactic of attacking religion employed by Communists was to spread false information concerning religious activities. Of great importance in the Russian Orthodox tradition is the role of icons; many Orthodox believers fill a corner of their home with these religious symbols and pray to them daily. The League of Militant Atheists felt it was important to remove these religious relics from individual homes and composed various lies to justify their destruction. In one especially fierce effort to eradicate religious possessions, the League of Militant Atheists "claimed that an epidemic of syphilis in the countryside was being spread through the practice of kissing icons." The Soviets actively sought to prevent religious education and replace it with atheistic propaganda. For homework, school children were sometimes asked to go home and try to convert one member of their family to atheism and the schools daily ran through anti-religious lessons […] The Soviet educational system held "the bringing up of children in the atheist spirit" as one of its primary missions.

- Paul Froese ("Forced Secularization in Soviet Russia: Why an Atheistic Monopoly Failed")

[pornosophical]

The pharma companies didn't just stop making ADHD medication, it's a whole big kerfuffle (Operation Bottleneck) with the DEA/FDA trying to head off another oxycontin situation and absolutely shitting the bed by refusing to recognize that opiates and stimulants are very different

There’s been a national shortage of ADHD medication for more than a year and a half. According to the government and industry experts, there are multiple overlapping causes: manufacturing problems, labor issues, supply-chain failures, and a huge rise in demand during the pandemic. But Ascent claims there’s another factor exacerbating the shortage, one that’s completely sui generis: the fact that it’s been shut down by the Drug Enforcement Administration. The agency has accused Ascent of shabby recordkeeping that might have allowed millions of pills to go unaccounted for. Ascent makes painkillers in addition to stimulants, and, amid the ongoing opioid epidemic, the DEA has been under pressure to show it is aggressively policing the industry. (The agency did not respond to requests for comment.) Ascent has said that its paperwork is in order and has sued the Department of Justice to get its assembly lines working again.

[gulfportofficial]

I told all of this in a huge rant to a mate yesterday but I wanted to share it with you too.

The world is very weird sometimes, in the way that all things are connected.

I went down an opioids rabbit hole off the back of reading about the opium laundered through Hawai’i in the latter part of the 19th C (at the point my Nice Gulfport fic is set you could actually buy it prepared for smoking from any old pharmacy in, at least Honolulu, I don’t know about smaller ports - like, not just opiates marketed as painkillers, but actually prepared opium designed to get you high).

Anyway, was sort of reading my way through various distribution networks and how closely this is all related to various industries funneled through Hawai’i - such as sugar, which is the subject of the fic in the same way oil is the subject of GP, which of course BOOMED in Hawai’i during/following the civil war, since basically all the continentally produced sugar cane came from the South. Can’t get it from the South? Well, you will have to get it from Hawai’i. (Sugar cane was grown in Hawai’i, esp. on Kaua’i, where my protagonists live, refined to raw sugar, which was then shipped to San Francisco to be refined into white sugar.)

So already this has a neat little connection to Louis’ whole evil plantation fortune and pretentious position on refined sugar.*

So: Later in the century it was kind of the same thing with opium, though the opium came through Hawai’i to san fran, it was not grown in Hawai’i - bunch of American missionary descendants, of course.

ANYWAY so I was just reading about that and the foregrounding for a lot of stuff that foregrounded the opioid epidemic a century later - The Hawai’i - San Fran opium trade was pretty similar to oxycodone in some ways, in that it was perfectly legal at this point - just not in those quantities and not at that distribution point.

This of course was a time when Bayer of Asprin fame was completely within their legal rights to advertise and sell heroin. And as I was reading things I clicked on an article about the dr who inspired Michael Keaton's character in Dopesick.

And what was the site? The paper the article was in?

The Mobile Press-Register. The paper Gulfport Louis writes for. Me like: ah hello. Hello, old friend.

*Louis, in IWTV:

[sarahdogoc80]

Part 2. The Doctor Behind the Epidemic

I know I said I would talk about the women but I forgot I should probably talk about the doctors first. I don't want them taking attention away from the women victims.

So doctors how come some people don't look at what the doctors where doing during before and during it? Well it depends on the doctor honestly. But I know three doctors who handled this whole thing differently.

Doctor A. He had no problems putting his patients on oxycodine for the money. He was my mom and Dad's doctor up till recently. He has know me since I was on chemo and my brother in a baby carrier. After a car accident he had my mom on 2x 80mg Oxycotin and 2x 10 Percocet a day after 6 months of her starting a pain management plan in 2008. When she showed some hesitation he lied to her face and said they were less addictive then oxycodone. She was still on edge so gave her free samples and the pen and notepad with the Oxycotin name. He gave her enough to get addicted and she came back and started her "treatment".

Doctor B. Was a more chill with giving out Vikes and Percocet but did have some skepticism about oxy products. But if you really wanted them he'd just write you a script. He was brought in as a doctor for the local steel mill workers in the 60's. He was bought in so he could write the company's employees pain pills. He retired in 2015 just in time for the Crisis to hit. Dispite the factory closing in the 90's he stayed and in town was know as a writer.

Doctor C. Is a distance family members. He's like my mom's second cousin but I still was able to talk to him. He went thought a joker moment while studying to be a cancer research doctor. He did this because he had to watch his mom slowly and painfully die of lung cancer. Turns out they could have probley saved her if only his family could have afforded the treatment. Realizing the system is more corrupt then a Russian politician. He went into family medicine and decided to help as many people as he could within the corrupt system. He'd tell the family/ trusted patients any new regulations coming so they could get around them. He taught us a trick to clear our system for drug test. No I will not say what he did. As it's dangerous if you don't wrong and can cause your kidneys to shut down if done wrong. He would write opioid scripts for anyone in the family who asked. He also (as long as it was weed and not something hard) would tamper with drug test so family and patients alike wouldn't fail. He was focused to retire due to getting caught tampering with the state drug test. Or they threaten to destroy his reputation and arrest him. He choice to retire. He seen thought oxycodine ploy so wouldn't write scripts for those. But Percocet and Vikes were fine.

These three all contributed to the problem in different ways. For different reasons. The Oxycodine company was pushing all doctors who could to get people on this drug. Combine this with the 2008 Recession and we have the factors to make a storm. People my age would probably be surprised to find out their mom/dad went on oxycodine or other opiate products to sell for them to have food money, pay bills, get them that shinny new X Box 360, etc. Some took them but there were plenty who refused to take the medicine and just sold them. Thought I don't think this makes them villains dispite them feeding into the coming crisis. Because for a lot of these people it's how they had to get by. Do SOME of you forget that this happened between the transitions from Bush to Obama. And that Bush was harsher on social services. Some families couldn't get food stamps or any of the government assistance because they made just a little too much. These family weren't thinking of the ramifications of don't this. Alot of them didn't even realize their oxycodine was being used in he production of heroin they just wanted the money. Jobs became limited so if one parent had a job they were lucky. And some of these women haven't worked for a couple years to take care of the children. So not many people wanted to hire them. So alot of women easily got pain pills to sell.

Some doctors took full advantage of this. Getting them on as much as they could so they could get those juicy payouts. I'm unsure to what extent doctor at the time knew their patients were selling but as this problem got worse they did little to step in.

Doctor A. Witnessed my dad drag my mom in by her hair and told him to take her off oxycotine. Which he did for a week then she came in like normal and had no problem getting her script. He could care less about any of this and just wanted them pushed. He didn't care my dad was abusing my mom over these pills. Just as long as she still paid for them he didn't care.

Doctor C. Was doing what he thought was right. Because he realized having people on pain pills them cutting them off cold turkey would cause them to go to the streets. He kept the feds at bay for as long as he could. But was eventually caught and had to leave. I would hardly call him bad. While he was going against the law. It was to help his patients. He had a good reputation and was well liked. One thing he did was if you didn't need the pain pills anymore he would help tapper you off pain pills rather then just cut you off if you didn't need them anymore. And if you had a addiction he would ask why and usually recommend you to therapy (wow what a concept people with addiction need mental help not just help off the drugs). People in his town did genuinely like him and it's hard to find someone who hated him.

Doctor A and B worked within the law all the way though and what do you know most of their patients went to her street because they didn't care to help them. They just covered their own ass all through this. Because oh no taking accountability is scary and they could loose their licenses.

I want to note back then alot of doctors got their pain management license from a class they took every 6 months. Rather then now a days of having people who know about these drugs dealing with them they let any one get their license. Guess who would pay for these "classes" that right the Oxycotin company. Now a days for example there are so little pain management doctors around because now they have to actually know about what they are prescribing. For example my pain management doctor is a anesthesiologist which is related to PM. So she you know, knows about these drugs very well. And she also has her own system to watch for early addiction. She has a little record of your life. If you have a job, your position, stuff like that. Because if you come in disheveled and lose your job that's an early sigh of addiction and she can catch it. Fun fact about PM I'm her youngest patient at 24. When the state drug tested came in to piss test me first thing she said was "Oh wow your just a baby." I just simply replied that "Yeah I was when I had cancer." She wasn't being mean she was just shocked to see someone my age. And didn't press me after seeing my scar on my foot.

Pain management now a days is far from good though they just over regulated like they did in the 70's. Thought the way the system is set up it's screwing over the people who need it most. I would walk someone in my building's dog and she was 87 and could barely get around. They cut her off pain pills for three months because she couldn't pee in the cup. She tried just telling them to take blood or a catheter but they refused and fought her on this for three months. Till they eventually agreed to do a blood test and called her in a months with of pills so she could you know test positive for them. My grandma also won't entertain going because of the hassle and because of something I want to talk about when I talk about the women victims.

Again as a said. Doctor's knew to an extent that them being extended release was BS. It was as addictive as Oxycodone. If not worse because of it's extended release. How are people listing to their doctor the wrong ones in this situation. The Doctors knew these substances were addictive. And rather then try and help them if they went off the deep end they either didn't care and kept writing or cut them off then acted surprised when they turned to street drugs. None of this had to happen. It was greed on the part of the doctors. They took advantage of people not knowing much about Opeits and got them hooked. The ones who did know they lied to their faces and parrot that horrible lie that it's extended release it's less addictive. They didn't care about the families they destroyed they just blamed the addicts because who will defend them they are just junkies. They were just trying to help them, getting thousands from the Oxycodine company was not related what so ever./S I hope the ruined families and lives where worth their new floors, or expensive vacations. I hope victim blaming their victims keeps them up at night. They knew what they did. The blood is on the Oxycotin company and the medical system.

[louderfade]

i worry about you. i hope you're using illegal substances responsibly. *

*meant sincerely and unironically <3

thanks this is sweet. but don't worry honestly i'm very responsible. i know the source of all my shit and i don't do opiates anymore but i have the test strips and narcan and everything bc the fent epidemic is real yo. your concern is appreciated but i promise i got it on lock. <3