BRATTLEBORO — I'd like to raise an issue with the current stopgap procedure of making all patients prescribed pain medications physically pick up their paper prescriptions from their doctor's office monthly.
First, this implies that all who are prescribed these drugs by their doctors are misusing them. This is simply not the case.
These drugs have a purpose, and most patients who use them - or at least those who are in enough pain to need a regimen of some type of relief - don't like the effects of too much of the drug. (Living life asleep? No, thank you.) They prefer to take them as prescribed and to function, which the prescribed medication allows them to do.
Second: The prescription can be picked up or mailed. What? The nurse at my doctor's office said they took no liability for the prescription after it goes into the mailbox and would not redo a lost prescription. So it's okay to send a prescription through the mail at the risk of it simply being lifted out of a mailbox or whatever but it's not okay to transmit the prescription from a doctor's office directly to the pharmacy? The safest possible method? That policy makes no sense whatsoever.
Especially when the patients who take these medications legitimately (the population this is most affecting) are in pain - disabled from it. Why would the state make these vulnerable people take two extra steps - in this rural state, in some cases involving great distances - for legitimate medication that allows them to function?
There's so much more to this complex problem than simply stigmatizing (and criminalizing). We are patients with doctors with whom we share our history. They diagnose and then they prescribe accordingly.
Substance abuse has no business being in this relationship unless it's between a doctor and patient. This wholly general approach is a simplistic and wrongful approach to a very serious problem.
Talk about jobs and how to relieve depression in the population of Vermont.
And go after the perpetrators.
The pharmaceutical companies that make these drugs have overdistributed and aggressively marketed them, and they knew exactly what was happening with their product. They do inventory control and market research.
Purdue Pharma, the manufacturer of Oxycontin and other potentially addictive drugs, should be on the line to contribute to rehab facilities and for an education campaign.
As legitimate, licensed entities, pharmaceutical companies should take responsibility for the overprescription of their products and for their marketing campaigns - the same way big tobacco has been made to take responsibility for and curb marketing designed to appeal to children.