That's very unfortunate and sad, Penni. MJ and I agree, morphine doesn't do anything personality-wise to me. But you know, the important truth about practically all drugs is that they need watched. I don't mean that as news to you.
Paxil made me very um weird. I didn't speak for four days and didn't remember the donkey in the desert biting the window glass edge in the car hard enough to break it. (MJ was squealing at me to roll up my window; apparently I was interested, in the donkey.) That should have been a hallucination, it wasn't; and should have been remembered, I didn't care. When we told shrink it didn't agree with me, and he was really surprised. Well gee, those are reports. The best evidence.
I took morphine for about twenty days once. Long enough to dislike getting off of it. It teaches you not to take it.
If morphine was doing that, personality changes, to my parents, I would be pissed off. I bet part of the damn problem is that ALL pain medicine is considered taboo for serious application, study, and innovation, at the public level. Putting effort into it is not cool. Choosing or rapidly rotating drugs is seen as incorrect choice the first time, or dinking suspiciously, or letting patients run you. Look at that 60 Minutes program on how Doctors are treated who prescribe opiates to people with no option back injuries et al. Like dealers. Investigated. Licenses revoked. Not many people are going to spend much effort trying to modify pain medication to be the best possible for people.
Or hire an acupuncturist and include them in insurance.
I was prescribed Dexedrine for ADD. Last resort. It wasn't worth it. The pharmacy couldn't guarantee to provide them. They're given allocations. They basically have found it unworthwhile to increase or decrease what they absolutely are stuck providing and loathe altering it. (Don't try another pharmacy.) I had a frank discussion with my pharmacist about the impracticalities of "controlled substances." For christsakes, I felt sorry for him, and I was the person being denied a legitimate prescription. You have to establish a record of commercial co-dependence with a single pharmacy. What bullshit! Fuck the government. It's not regulation of illegitimate supply, it's strangulation and intimidation. If I'm prescribed Dexedrine, I have a goddam right to it. There are ways, if one were really interested in guaranteeing the safe and legitimate distribution of potentially addictive medicines, to do it without depriving people access, and encouraging pharmacies to deny them.
Why should pharmacies be denying people medicine? Is that where we want our accounting? Think old people can put up with that?
I'd throw a fit or change countries if I had a pain problem; but I have almost no family.
This country has "drug" problems. It's all messed up. The values and picture are wrong. Not the "recreational" ones; the medical ones.
Bitch, bitch, bitch.
Hit me.
However; I do remember my recent anesthesiologist telling me, in a very quiet and sincere voice, that the reason he liked anesthesiology, was because he "liked decreasing people's pain." I feel like this compassionate guy, caring guy, is the kind of guy we need. I also worried, the moment I heard them, that those words will get him into trouble. |
