The same with pain. It is great to say you should or should not have access to to certain medications and that sounds great. But what happens when you fall prey to bone cancer and the gut-wrenching pain (constant) that accompanies it? Laying there in pure mortal agony do you really think you would vote to do away with morpheine or any other opiate that might possible give you a few moments of relief? I think not.

Our country and our lawmakers need to practice more understanding and less condemnation.

or visit hookers.

I’m not saying it’s accurate, but doesn’t it describe 90% of self-identified libertarians fairly well?

Yeah, so are Canadian doctors. While my dad was waiting for surgery to fix a hernia, he had to outright scream at the doctors to get something more than freaking Tylenol 3’s.

I say, if you’ve made it past 80, you should get whatever drug you want, free, in the mail, every week.

Exactly. He’s not really a libertarian. He’s just somebody who apes Libertarian philosophy when what they really mean is “the government shouldn’t make ME do anything that I want to do.”

Not too many years ago, a friend of mine lay dying from breast cancer. As she writhed in agony, literally wailing because of the pain, her doctor refused to give her more morphine. Why? Because he’d already had several threatening visits from DEA because he wrote more pain-killer prescriptions than DEA guidelines allowed. Nevermind that his specialty was dealing with end-stage cancer patients.

Thus, in of protecting us from the evils of drugs are thousands sentenced to mortal agony.

If you want a real laugh, go back and look at the Congressional “debate” over whether to allow terminal cancer patients to be administered heroin. Marvel at such leading Democratic lights as Charley Rangel wondering “what kind of message does it send the children” if we allow dying people access to effective painkillers.

In general, those who become addicted to and abuse the opioids do so with inappropriate use of extended release formulations - they crush, grind or otherwise adulterate them to get high and then we have people attacking pharma for creating these drugs (there are a lot of things to attack pharma for, this is not one of them) and creating these addicts (or someone who dies after first inappropriate use of them) instead of putting responsibility where it’s due. Case in point, palladone (a very potent once/day formulation of hydromorphone) was just pulled because of all the folks who died using it. ..it seems the people who died drank alcohol with the drug.