I've talked about this before. You can have as many pain pills as you want as long as you have a prescription for them and don't get caught selling them to anyone else. There are legal pill mills all over the country. Many are clinics that are called pain management or some such. Granted, some are legitimate pain management clinics. Others are pill mills. The population of this county is not very large and we lose several folks a month to OD's on pain pills. Some people make a living on doctor shopping to get enough pills for themselves and then selling enough to keep the enterprise going. Unless you catch them selling there's not much that can be done about it...until they catch themselves. Most of these "pillheads" aren't exactly pillars of the community and as such they aren't missed when they are gone. However, some of them are people you've known and worked with that got hooked after being treated for some kind of injury or other condition. One of the common forms of ODing is called the Soma coma. Eat a bunch of Lortabs or Oxycontin, wash down a bunch of Somas,(muscle relaxents) sometimes with alcohol, go into a coma and die.

We had another one yesterday. She was a young woman I'll call Tracy. At one time she was married and had a family. Somehow she got hooked up with a pillhead I'll call Keith. At first it wasn't too bad. Keith would bring her a few pills when her husband was at work. Then she got to going to Keith's house for extended periods of time. At first her husband would go get her and bring her home, even if she had been gone for a week or more. They eventually divorced, she moved in with Keith, and they got a divorce. Her ex-husband got custody of the kids. Keith bought her a boob job. I guess the pain killers helped with this. Crazy Joe found out about the boob job and wanted a free look. He held her at gunpoint until he got to see them. I answered the call on that one. I don't know why she called. She refused to give a statement and didn't want to prosecute. "I'd a showed 'em to him if he'd just asked. He didn't have to pull no gun." Crazy Joe Jr. died not long after this incident form an OD. Crazy Joe got even crazier and after three taserings we got him commited. He's been OK for the last year. He walks around in a fog. He's one of the few who actually takes his meds...for now.

The point I'm trying to make with this is is there's some things our lawmakers can do to prevent this from happening. It's the same thing with the highly addictive crystal meth problem. You can't buy Sudafed by the pallet anymore, but you can still buy it. They make cold meds without ephidrine that work just as good. You ain't gonna hear the makers of Sudafed fussing about this problem. They're making too much money off of it. Apparently the lawmakers are too preoccupied with getting free medical care to these folks so more of this stuff can happen...for free. I recently read a PC article on how over 70% of the young people can't enter the armed services because they are too fat or too stupid. The article didn't mention drug abuse. It should have.

It's a mega problem that's for sure. I injured my shoulder last week, doc prescribed some Tylenol 3 (Mild compared to some others) I took one, felt like I was in outer space, threw the rest in the trash. Hard for me to understand why dope is so attractive, but it is to a huge percent of society.

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Let go...Let Gun

Aloha,

Usually when prescribed pain pills, I try to not take them unless I Have to. Otherwise it's just generic ibuprofin or similar.

The wife and I keep the prescribed pain med for emergencies like hurricanes where medical help isn't availible for a while. We also have a small first aid kit to go along with it.

Just for the record....Pain pills are a godsend for those who need them. Doctors generally prescribe them because they honestly feel the patient needs them (most doc's.) The problems Charlie describes isn't legitimate use, its abuse by those who don't hold prescriptions for them.

Shugart is a backroom pharmacist. The ones Charlie complains about are the more casual, streetcorner guys. They see and sometime sell pills for sex. Shugart....well, he's got his own captive assistants and GF. The problem is, he's got to account for his pill collection!

There are other sources of prescription pills, too. They were the legitimate prescriptions that weren't fully used by the patient. My wife had a prescription for 30 tylenol #4s. She probably took 2 or 3, then stopped because she didn't need them. Over the last year, I looked in the bottle. There were 3 pills, definitely not pain pills. Someone had stolen them from our bathroom. Put some sinus pills in the bottle so it looked like contents, not an empty bottle.

We gave it some thought. She's a nurse, so she's more tolerant than I am (? doesn't make sense, but she is.) We don't have guests all that often. We pretty much narrowed it down to a party we have every Labor Day. Her conclusion was we had 5 or 6 different guests with chronic pain problem. Could have been any of them. The rule we didn't adhere to is an old one. Keep all meds out of the reach of others. She always felt her medicine cabinet was secure, who would steal someone elses meds? The simple answer is those 27 or 28 pills were worth bucks each. It was an easy score for someone.

Last spring we were staying at a motel for 10 days. I had the worldly remains of a prescription of 10 tylenol #3s. One day it vanished. It wasn't me, and it wasn't her, so that only leaves the house cleaning crew. The motel manager, who we know pretty well, was mad at us for even bringing the subject up. She defended her crew, saying none of them would steal. We dropped the subject, because it was the easy way of handling it. But I'd bet we weren't the only victims, either while traveling or having a party in our home.

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Dick Burg