Jumping To Conclusions, Or How Opinionated Are You?

Social media and politics have handed us a fresh supply of hasty verdicts about how the world ought to run. The other night I was watching Fox News and heard someone declare that oxycontin was behind a wave of drug deaths, that the manufacturer had marketed it dishonestly as safe for pain and safe to take in rising doses, and that this had hooked people and killed them. The takeaway from his words was that no one, anywhere, for any reason, should be allowed near the drug. He was certain. Even a person in unbearable pain, by his logic, should go without.

What he skipped was the rest of the picture, probably because none of it touched him personally. When a presentation runs on opinion alone it tends to flatten the subject into one side, and the decisions that follow can land hard on people who were never misusing anything. Current prescription rules already keep patients from stockpiling large amounts, and plenty of us would never go looking for a dealer.

I happen to be one of those patients. I have neuropathy from spinal stenosis. Years ago I was operated on successfully, which kept me from becoming a quadriplegic, but some of the nerve pain had already set in before the surgery and it never left. I take medication for it. The medication only does so much, and the condition has worsened, so there are stretches where the pain is more than I can stand and the neuropathy drugs simply don't reach it.

With my doctor's knowledge I also use over the counter pain relievers. Some days even the two together leave me nowhere. I live a fair distance from the emergency room, and the thought of an ambulance ride that long while spasms and burning run through me is its own kind of dread. For that, I keep a small supply of oxycontin. I use it carefully, not every time the pain shows up, which can be daily. I ration it against what the day asks of me and how much I can grit through.

I have taken oxycontin before, after a couple of surgeries, and it wasn't gentle. One time I ended up with constipation I couldn't shake and a strange warp in my sense of time, convinced that hours had gone by when it had only been minutes. That was with a pump meant to cap the dose, yet the amount still overwhelmed me, and as far as I could tell nobody was really keeping an eye on me.

The man on television struck me as a know-it-all who hadn't actually done the work. He'd read or been told something and run with it, never checking the other half of the story. People like that can tip the balance against a whole group who don't abuse the drug at all, leaving them in pain for no good reason.

It strikes me that we hand down opinions most freely about things that will never reach us. There's a dictator's logic to it. The person issuing the order rarely has to live under it.

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