-
"I actually had tried
suicide 3 times before I found a pain specialist who prescribed enough
narcotics for me to live and function..."
August, 2001: Over the last several months, anyone who has picked up a newspaper or watched a television news broadcast is bound to have come across the controversy surrounding OxyContin® and its abuse. It's a hot and sometimes sensitive subject - one that evokes more questions than answers.
The facts are hard to pin down. For example: While some news reports attributed 59 deaths in Kentucky to OxyContin®, other reports have said that in many of those deaths, there were other drugs and/or alcohol involved. Some reports have also said that while autopsies revealed the presence of oxycodone, they were not definitive on the issue of whether that oxycodone came from OxyContin®, Percocet®, or one of several other drugs containing oxycodone.
On August 10, Purdue Pharma, the manufacturer of OxyContin®, announced that they expect "to receive notification soon of the publication of an international patent application for a pharmaceutical formulation that combines an opioid pain reliever with a "sequestered antagonist" that would work to help prevent the medication from being abused." This means that they are working to manufacture a form of OxyContin® that couldn't be abused as it is now. Unfortunately, this cannot offer an immediate solution because of the time needed for development, clinical trials, and FDA approval. (For the complete press release on this announcement, click here.)
While all of this has been going on, another group of people have been watching with apprehension and fear, afraid their needs and rights are going to be lost in the frenzy of concern over the abuse of OxyContin®. They're chronic pain patients, some of them suffering from migraine or other headache disorders. They're the people whose lives are made bearable only by this time-release pain reliever . . . people who might literally commit suicide if the relief of OxyContin® were not available to them. They've broken no laws, harmed nobody, yet some of them already are experiencing problems obtaining their medication, and countless others live in fear that it will happen to them, too. Let's take a look at what some of these patients and their doctors have to say:
- "I'd rather die than go back to the kind of pain I was experiencing before I started on OxyContin®," she said. "I'm scared to death that I won't be able to get it in the future. It's given me my life back.''1
- "There are eight other
pharmaceutical products that contain oxycodone on the market, and they are all
being abused, but they don't get nearly the publicity that OxyContin® does," he
said. "This is an
extremely important medication - a breakthrough medication - in the treatment of pain. There are arsons in this country every day too. Should we try to outlaw matches? "The bottom line is that as doctors, we're required to treat pain. That's the standard."1 - "I've been refused treatment in the ER because they think I'm a drug seeker," said Jeannette Murray. The 31-year-old nurse, who lives in an area of southwestern Virginia that is a hotbed of OxyContin® addiction, takes the drug to relieve chronic pain from an injury to her right arm."2
- "This is not just about
OxyContin®, " said John D. Giglio, executive director of the American Pain
Foundation, a nonprofit consumer group in Baltimore. "This is about the
potential for rolling back progress made in pain management. It's
been an extremely hard uphill climb to get physicians to become more comfortable prescribing opiates and overcoming the stigma among patients about potential addiction and abuse."2 - "Since all this hysteria began, some patients have been abandoned by their doctors," said Dr. J.S. Hochman, executive director of the National Foundation for Treatment of Pain in Houston. "I had two patients, a mother and daughter with severe rheumatoid arthritis who had to fly from Boston to Houston to find a doctor--and were willing to do so because they were so desperate. It's pathetic."2
