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When going over the "opioid crisis" from the news/government, there are many things that blur the line between who or what makes an addict. You also need to look at the people who promote "Harm Reduction" and treatment as separate from people who need it. Those who push the addiction treatment angle and push the Buprenorphine angle are part of a large rise in for-profit treatment centers, that pick up a lot of people who are not addicted.
The funny thing is that she says she understands that the Opioid Crisis is like the Crack Epidemic from before ( Atlanta Black Star May 18th 2017). But forgets to point out that Opiates are necessary healthcare. Unlike the Crack push during the 80's, modern medicine needs high strength pain relief. Crack/Cocaine have no medical purpose besides some eye and brain surgery aspects, but surgery needs opiate pain relief in order to save lives. Too much pain during surgery will kill people. Too much pain in recovery from surgery leads to chronic conditions.
Nearly all the focus has been on treatment and ignoring the medical usefulness of those drugs. While I will fully admit that she has not said anything directly against pain medication, she hasn't said anything positive about them either. A lot of the worry with her in pain management groups has been her tough talk on crime.
During her CA AG years, she fought to keep prisoners in overcrowded prisons instead of following the Supreme Court orders. During her time in San Fracisco, she has had no recourse over locking up parents over school truancy. This leads toward a tough on crime person who many pain patients believe will keep the DEA punishing doctors who prescribe pain medication.
The CDC has already revised their disastrous guidelines for opiate prescriptions. Those guidelines were way outside their expertise due to the fact that addiction is not a communicable disease. Another problem with the CDC changes is that the media has ignored the problems.
The person involved with the CDC changes has invested heavily in treatment centers which make great money on recycling people through their doors no matter if they are actual addicts or pain patients. With new medicaid and Medicare guaranteed funding, addiction is good money with nebulous result metrics. Patients with chronic pain issues end up unable to receive adequate treatment once their file has been marked with the scarlet letter A.
Senator Harris on competition
While a Senator, Harris got into a "beef" with the makers of Vivitrol, an alternative to Buprenorphine, which is still the major drug in use today. Buprenorphine has supplanted all other medication in the treatment of opiate use disorder, the official name for addiction, in fact the majority of all doctors now are pressured into that single drug for pain and addiction. Even though Buprenorphine hasn't been approved for chronic pain, doctors don't get bothered as long as they push Buprenorphine.
That's a problem for pain patients, because Buprenorphine has even worse withdrawal effects than heroin, which feeds into the addiction treatment center cycle.
Because of the VA having such a PR loss in the 2010's, you can't get anything else but Buprenorphine from them without going through years of trials of everything.
To wind back to Kamala Harris, we have to infer things from her past and how she has changed her politics. She has a poor distinction of the actual problem when it comes to patients. That is actually a problem with how difficult it seems to find old data searching the web. She doesn't have all too many direct quotes, so we have to infer based on disparate sources.
The DEA are going after doctors who prescribe medication that isn't on the "list". The DEA are also pushing hard against ADHD medication stocks, which pushes many people to choose between the black market, screaming in agony, or suicide (which have gone up a lot during the recent crackdown on both medications).
Harris is still pushing the old way of harm reduction and treatment without taking into account patients who actually need the pain medication that isn't Suboxone prescribed off-label.
If you really are interested in the pain patient story, check out:
That article has a lot of information about the problems facing pain patients.
Maybe Kamala doesn't know, we all know that Trump doesn't care. Kamala Harris is still pushing the old broken ideas from a decade ago. flawed views by everyone in 2019
I hope this had enough information. Attacking people with actual problems won't change things. Separation of the 2% who actively have the addiction brain issue from the rest will make this whole thing go away. I'm stuck on using a high dose of off-label Suboxone thar took me over a year of hell and pain to slightly manage my pain, when If the DEA would allow doctors to prescribe based on science would be going back to my treatments from 2003-2012 where I had a close to normal life. Then they took all my medications away, gave me drugs that increased my weight by 80+ pounds and helped ruin my family life, divorce, and losing g access to my son. But hey. The makers of Buprenorphine sure made a lot of money, while I lost most of my teeth.