Giving Compass' Take:

• Sally Satel and Stefan Kertesz illustrate the continued need for opioids among pain patients who cannot function normally without pain suppressors. 

• How can policies that address the opioid crisis be crafted to protect these people? Can philanthropy support research into non-addictive alternatives to remedy this problem? 

• Find out how marijuana is working to aid the fight against the opioid crisis.

In the face of an ever-worsening opioid crisis, physicians concerned about fueling the epidemic are increasingly heeding warnings and feeling pressured to constrain prescribing in the name of public health. As they do so, abruptly ending treatment regimens on which many chronic pain patients have come to rely, they end up leaving some patients in agonizing pain or worse.

Since her early 30s, Dr. R suffered from an excruciating condition called Interstitial Cystitis (IC). She described it as a “feeling like I had a lit match in my bladder and urethra.” Her doctor placed her on methadone and she continued in her medical practice on a relatively low dose, for 34 years. As Dr. R told one of us, “Methadone has saved my life. Not to sound irrational, but I don’t think I would have survived without it.”

Then a crisis: “Unfortunately for me, the feds are clamping down on docs prescribing opiates. My doctor decided that she did not want to treat me anymore, didn’t give me a last prescription, and didn’t wait until I found another pain doctor who would help me.” For the past 30 years, Dr. R has been an advocate for better treatment of IC and reports “many suicides in the IC patient population due to the severity of the pain.”

Thankfully, Dr. R found someone to treat her. Doug Hale, 53, of Vermont was less fortunate. On Oct. 11, 2016, he died by suicide.

“My husband Doug took his own life after being cut off abruptly from his long-term therapy for intractable chronic pain,” his wife, Tammi, wrote in a survey collected by a rehabilitation scholar.

Read the full article about people who need opioids by Sally Satel and Stefan Kertesz at American Enterprise Institute.