Quote:
Originally Posted by theantihero
I'm not really sure what the medical benefits of opioids would be so until there's further research on it then I say keep it restricted.
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They have been used to treat pain medically going back to at least 3000BC. Their addicive potential has been long known as well. 2 wars were fought over it (chinese opium wars). Chemistry has gotten better though, so some back actors are currently profiting from a bad system. Fentanyl, for example, is a modern invention. The short term prescribed use of opioids like morphine is usually well justified and fairly well established medically and therefore unlikely to ever go away completely. There is debate about their use in chronic pain patients(long term opioid scripts in people with intractable pain), but little to no debate around severe acute pain unless the patient is some known drug seeker. Some say the practice of using them for chronic produces tolerance to real patients and enables a lot of drug seekers to mascarade as patients, but others say that evidence supports long term pain killers are beneficial to some people and allow them to live a full life. The debate is then: do we deny some legit patients what could have been a full life with medicine we have known about for millenia or do we deny it to them out of mere hope that some drug seeker somewhere turns their life around and lives a full life due to less access to drugs? I think the former is more just personally. The drug seekers have simply moved to more dangerous stuff anyways.