The stuff is four times powerful than heroin, if I'm not mistaken. That's bone-chillingly scary to me. I know the stuff has some benefits, and I don't want to downplay the suffering of anyone who's in severe pain, I've never walked in those shoes but something could happen and I could wake up in the a.m. and be in those shoes, looking for relief.
But when you put the good on one scale and the bad on the other, do they balance or does the bad outweigh the good?
A friend of my mother's lost one kid to an Oxy overdose and had another go through rehab. The girl who went through rehab, last I heard she was clean and was going around giving speeches about the dangers of drug abuse, but she also told someone that she still craved Oxy 365/24/7, that it just has an undescribable hold on you, which makes me less than optimistic about the chances of her staying clean although I pray she will.
A couple of years ago, when Oxy was really bad around my neck of the woods, the cops found two teenage girls in their car in the parking lot at a high school football game, both zonked out on Oxy, the needles literally still sticking out of their arms, and they were basically comatose, drooling and had lost control of their bodily functions.
I ask again, when you put stuff like that on one side of the scales and the good it does on the other side, does it balance?
One more anecdotal story I've told here before, a person I work with has a husband who's disabled and in constant pain. His doctor wanted to put him on Oxy. She told him under no circumstances would she permit Oxy to be brought into her house, period, end of discussion, that he'd have to find something else to relieve his pain.
On the one hand, that's cold ... but on the other hand, is her fear not justified?