An Opportunity, If Helping People Is What You Seek
By Mitch Berg
To: Seni. Kellty Morrison
From: Mitch Berg: Prole on a mission
Re: Opportunity, if you’ve got the guts to take it.
Senator Morrison,
I left a message and an email with your office about this subject earlier this week. I’ve heard nothing. I’m sure it’s just an oversight.
Anyway – let’s try to seek some common ground, shall we?
The other day, you twote about your…er, I’m not sure whether to call it a “job”, “assignment” or what.
I’ll let your tweet explain as far as we can:
So here’s what I hope: when you say “engage” you, as an M.D., mean “address some of the horrific unintended consequences of Minnesota’s current opioid policy, which involves non-medical bureaucrats almost literally bean-counting doctors’ prescriptions for opioids to compare them to a more or less arbitrary standard that doesn’t account for patients’ actual need for painkillers, which has left a staggering number of chronic pain patiens and cancer patients in life-altering, wretched constant pain, leading to an extremely disproportionate number of suicides and other serious long-term physical and mental health issues”.
I suspect it means you will continue the feckless avoidance many of your fellow legislators have practiced, trying to avoid the misguided wrath of the Fentanyl Fatality Families mob – who deserve sympathy, but not complete obeisance at the expense of other people who need pain meds…
…and can’t get them because bureaucrats can and do hold doctors licenses hostage for prescribing, responsible, medically indicated quantities that pain patients can easily absorb (there was a time I respected doctors enough to assume they knew things like “someone in horrific pain can absorb amounts of opioids that’d kill a healthy NFL lineman, becasue that’s how the body is built”, but after this past three years I assume nothing).
Any chance you could break with the medical know-nothings of, to be fair, both parties, and do some good, here?
Go ahead. Shock us all.
That is all.
April 14th, 2023 at 9:35 am
which involves non-medical bureaucrats almost literally bean-counting doctors’ prescriptions for opioids
It is much more nefarious than that. DEA put in place new req this year to maintain a license and it is so expensive and stinks of cronyism that my wife is considering dropping DEA altogether. She is not alone judging by what her colleagues are saying (around the country). There will come a day when Drs will not prescribe painkillers at all. It will be either over-the-counter meds or going to the hospital. Does anyone think that this will actually reduce the “opioid epidemic” or lower societal cost? Beuler?.. Bueler?…
April 14th, 2023 at 9:37 am
Any chance you could […] do some good, here?
Funny. Her new job has been discussed, arranged and agreed to beforehand. All you’re doing is asking if “doing some good, here” was part of the discussion.
I doubt it. How many people with intense pain vote?
April 14th, 2023 at 11:31 am
I have to wonder what percentage of people who die via overdose started with prescription painkillers. CDC says that about 40% of ODs involve prescription drugs, but that doesn’t necessarily count the person who got started with back pain and then was addicted even after the pain subsided.
If 60% are non-medical, then we’re moving medical to #2 on the Pareto at best. My hunch–informed by my niece’s funeral that may have involved this–is that a lot of it has to do with people for whom life simply sucks. I’m guessing if we fix that part, we solve both the medical and non-medical issues to a great degree.
(good reference point is that many were super concerned about the rate at which Vietnam era soldiers were using heroin, about 20%, and its impact once they came back….the interesting thing was that 95% of those who used in Vietnam did not in the U.S., so it was a 1% issue and not a 20% issue….being back with friends and family and sanity was the biggest mental health cure you could find)
April 14th, 2023 at 12:32 pm
My experience is similar, BB. I’ve known a few cancer patients & been the primary caretaker for one of them. None of them looked at the strong opioids they were taking as a way to get high. None of them continued using once they were pain free (one way or the other).
OTOH, I knew a biker dude who had been clean for a decade. Had some neck problems, was prescribed pain killers, and I have never seen a guy go downhill so fast. Last I heard he was in prison somewhere out east.