My son had six procedures on his nasal passages, sinuses, and throat. The doctor sent him and his wife home with a prescription for hydrocodone (liquid). While he was in excruciating pain and bleeding, they went to three pharmacies trying to get the prescription filled. They discovered that their usual pharmacy, Walmart, simply doesn’t fill such prescriptions at all. CVS didn’t have enough of it on hand to fill it. The third one, another CVS, finally did. By the time they got it, my son (a very strong and vibrant man) was hurting and shaking so badly that he could hardly take the medicine.
Aren’t we going overboard on the opioid epidemic when a patient is unable to fill a doctor-prescribed opioid for legitimate pain? I realize that, in the United States, there were 49,000 deaths involving opioids in 2017. If only we could be as concerned about the 1,000,000 deaths by abortion every year.