Pain and Suffering: Demonizing Opioids Has Unintended Consequences

June 11, 2024

(The Baffler) – The stigma is not hard to understand: magazine features, books, and movies for two decades now have chronicled America’s drug problems, including the rapacious role of drug manufacturers like Purdue Pharma, which made OxyContin a household name and enriched the Sackler family in the process. The publicity of their misdeeds led lawmakers on a campaign against opioid prescribing. Yet the crackdown had an unintended consequence, one little examined today: it has increased the suffering of patients who experience chronic pain, as medications that were once heavily promoted have since been restricted. And it has added to the needless agony of those like Marshall at the end of life. I told the story of Marshall and others like him in my 2016 book, The Good Death. Since that time, the double-sided problem has only seemed to worsen. Even morphine, which has long been used to ease the final days and hours of patients in hospice care, is only available to the fortunate ones, as supply chain problems have combined with fears of overuse, leading to vast inequities as to who dies in terrible pain. (Read More)