[bill_from_tampa]

Persons with chronic pain should have access to treatments that work for them. For some, it may be exercise, or physical therapy, or tylenol, or a TENS unit. For a few, it may be opioids in low or high doses. Treatments need to be able to be individualized to the specific patient - one size definitely does not fit all. Your pain may respond to meditation and tylenol, but somebody with a pancreas that is autodigesting itself or chronic unrepairable partial bowel obstruction with miserable horrible daily disabling pain may actually do better with opiates. When politicians and internet experts begin dictating medical treatment regimens, individual patients will suffer and die, or commit suicide.

On the other hand, persons who enjoy abusing substances to get high or blasted or whatever the feeling may be need to have some safe way of feeding their addiction, or they will die, in large numbers. Being dependent on an illegal supply chain stretching from Kowloon to Morelia to San Diego to wherever with no quality control and no oversight is a recipe for disaster -- nobody who buys stuff on the street knows what they are getting. And to boot, actual medical treatment for addiction is not easy to obtain and limited. The much vaunted "clinics" are for rich people who don't need health insurance to pay the bills.

So we will continue to have problems in the US, and they won't be fixed.