This feels-like-we're-doing-something-good effort to combat a manufactured crisis will hurt more than it helps. The Legislature is taking a "ready, fire, aim" approach guaranteed to create suffering for Minnesotans who need prescriptions to manage their real pain to sustain a real life.
We are talking about the lives of cancer patients, burn and trauma victims, amputees, and other major surgery patients.
It's arrogant and ignorant for politicians to say no one needs these pills, they shouldn't be made, or that one pill is the start of heroin addiction. People turn to street drugs for problems that government ignores, like pain and suffering. Prohibition and taxation do not stop illicit drug use anymore than they stop pain and suffering. Actually, they create it.
Mark Twain popularized the saying that there are "three kinds of lies: lies, damned lies, and statistics." Quoted numbers from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention say that 64,000 Americans die annually from drug overdoses. That is all drugs, legal and illegal. Of that, roughly half are by opioids, legal and illegal. Of that 32,000 — close to 90 percent are overdoses of the opioids heroin and fentanyl, leaving around 5,000 deaths per year from solely misusing prescription pills.
By comparison, more than 6,000 people a year commit suicide due to unmanageable pain; 6,000 die riding bicycles; 40,000 in cars; 88,000 from alcohol; and 480,000 from tobacco.
The last report in Minnesota said that 422 state residents died from opioid overdose in a year, legal and illegal. The authorities said that 91 percent of those were fentanyl or heroin. The 38 other deaths were attributed to misused authentic prescriptions.
Is the solution to increase costs on the 99.998 percent who don't misuse their drugs and who are alive because of these pills?
