[Monty22]

Isn't there some way to have these drugs only kill pain and not produce any 'positive' effects like feeling good? That's the only answer.

[Liberal Classic]

God forbid medicine would make people feel good.

[A CA Guy]

Medication acts on parts of the brain for it's effectiveness by mostly blocking signals of pain.

The problem is that drugs have been proved to change the brain and a person can become addicted for life due to the change chemicals made in the brain.

Rush is in deep sh!t with his situation.

He has three choices.

#1 Do without medication and feel excruciating pain.
#2 Medicate and expect to stay addicted.
#3 Do what Jerry Lewis did and get a devise implanted into the spine to block pain.

[tortoise]

Isn't there some way to have these drugs only kill pain and not produce any 'positive' effects like feeling good? That's the only answer.

This isn't really possible in any useful sense for most purposes. The body isn't "engineered" to make pain management a simple problem without trade-offs, so we do the best we can to balance the inherent costs with benefits. Short of something close to medical nanotechnology to re-engineer the flaws that are causing the problem to begin with at a low level, there is no real solution to the problem. Of course, if we could do that, we could also do a hell of a lot of other very cool stuff as well.