March 1, 2023 • 36 mins
Clayton and Greg are joined by New York Times columnist Maia Szalavitz to discuss one of the least talked about consequences of the War on Drugs: the criminalization of pain. Millions of Americans have been cut off from the pain medications they need to survive (including terminal cancer patients) as the United States tries to stem the tide of the opioid epidemic. Doctors who treat patients with chronic pain are finding themselves being labeled by the DEA as drug traffickers. The CDC has set guidelines for pain management that has left thousands of Americans without the medications they need. The results have been as horrifying as the opioid crisis these policies were meant to address—another clear example of the systemic failure of the War on Drugs.
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Episode Transcript
Available transcripts are automatically generated. Complete accuracy is not guaranteed.
Speaker 1 (00:03):
Clayton. What if I told you a medical doctor could
prescribe legal drugs and be charged as a drug trafficker.
A doctor like you're talking about a real doctor? Yeah,
medical doctor, not a dealer. A doctor not a dealer.
A new law means doctors are now only able to
write a prescription for a three day supply of opioids, or,
(00:24):
if medically necessary, seven days. Well, I mean, the thing
is that relying eighty percent of the people who are
getting in trouble are not prescribed these drugs. Directer regulations
aimed to stop people from misusing prescription drugs are leaving
patients who use opioids responsibly with greater challenges to get
their medication. But we have made it much worse and
more people are dying. If I didn't have just a
(00:47):
little bit that I can, I can't even imagine what
I would do. I understand that people overdosed and died,
but I didn't do any of that, and I actually
need the medicine. I'm Greg Glode, and this is the
war on drugs playing. What's going on? Man? What's up? Greg? Doing? Great?
(01:12):
Really excited about this topic. I mean, one of the
things that we've learned is the drug war. You don't
have to be a drug addict, you have to be
in the criminal justice system, you don't have to be
involved in this stuff like it's going to impact you.
And Yeah, we were chatting before and talking about like
being back in high school and starting to hear about
like people taking pills and like these things. You're like,
what is it? And um, you know, I grew up
(01:33):
in a pretty white suburb, you know, outside of Annapolis, Maryland,
And was that your same experience within like the black
community as well, Like listen to this or like how
did this all? When was the first time you heard
about like oxy and opiates? And um, I'm trying to
think back when I first realized what was going on.
I guess as far as like opioid epidemic, you know,
the crack epidemic. Saw that you knew about that it
(01:55):
was prevalent, it was heavy in the black community, and
the opioid like, I don't guess I knew they were opioids.
I just knew people popped pills. Yeah, pill popping. Yet
for me probably going into high school, oxycodon I remember
those never partook, but remember those being a thing very
(02:15):
popular all this stuff around codeine, and then I guess
I didn't realize, like for black people, you know, sir
lean codeine, that's that's also opioid. I think a lot
of times we associate, oh, that's white people's strugs. It's like, no,
it's the same thing. Just want to just liquid it.
It might taste a little bit better. Yeah, yeah, over
ice in a styrofoam cup. It's a slushy. It is delicious.
(02:41):
I have to heat the summer. Have you tried lean? Yeah, yeah,
it'll definitely be a little way in here first. Man,
I would highly uh not recommend going out. I don't
know if I knew it was an epidemic, but I
knew something was going on with as far as people
pill popping and like being a problem. When it was
a kid at my school, I think he wrote my
(03:02):
bus and he was on something, and I think somebody
asked what he was on. He told everybody that he
took the medicine that was for his cat, like it
was a cat trying. I don't know what it, but
I'm like, come on, man, you're gonna grow whiskers. You
don't know what's gonna happen. Man, you're gonna start licking yourself.
It's gonna be weird. So I knew then. I was like,
you may have a problem if you're taking medication that
(03:24):
was prescribed for your cat. Maybe they're getting a good
ship and we're listen, it's probably the same who's making
cat medicine. Nobody's making separate medicine for cats. That's a myth,
but it is like one of those things where like
you think it's something and then you start to learn
about it more and it's something else, because like I
think we all know some of the stories of like
Produe Pharma. They're marketing these opioids, are pushing and pushing
(03:44):
and saying they're not addictive. It can be addictive, and
how people are are using so much when they don't
need to just for the problem. And then you're kind
of like, all right, well let's stop prescribing these things, right,
But what we always do is like instead of just
solving that little problem with a little scalpel, we bring
the fucking machete and we just started hacking everything to bits.
And so now people who actually need this medication to
(04:08):
just function can no longer get it because we have
no idea how just to like solve one problem not
exacerbate another. And so we're going to talk to my
Salabates today. She's an amazing, amazing expert on this issue,
has her own real life experience recovering from addiction and
now works to allow people to understand like what addiction means,
what it is. And she's going to talk about a
lot of the complications now with the regulations and prohibition
(04:30):
of prescription opiates and how that's impacting people. Yeah, there's
gonna be people to abuse everything, and it's just a
shame that some of the people that need it most
got to suffer. And I think you don't have to
be a drug dealer for the port on drugs to
affect you. Yeah, I'm getting a little bit older, Clayton.
I'm sure you've woken up out of bed a couple
of times with you know, backs or something like that.
(04:51):
Are we just one, you know, fenderbender away from needing
some sort of prescription like this? And how's that going
to impact you? You never knowe to you put in
that situation or it's one of your loved ones, right,
you gotta watch an unbearable pain. Yeah, Like I said,
really really excited about this interview myself. It's is one
of the foremost experts on addiction in the world. We're
lucky enough to be able to interview for the War
(05:12):
on Drugs. So everyone, I really appreciate you all listening
and tune in. Let's let's get to it. Welcome to
the War on Drugs Podcast by I'm really great to
have you here. Welcome, Thank you so much for having me.
(05:33):
I think we're living in this almost twilight zone time
with the opoid epidemic, and I see so many parallels
with so many other wars that we fought within narcotics,
but this one's a little bit more unique because you know,
it's actual pharmaceuticals are being created by private entities that
are within those medical communities. I think a lot of
people are familiar with how when oxycon came out, people
(05:54):
were kind of misled on the potential complications of it.
It was seen as a less addictive opioid, which doesn't really,
you know, necessarily exist. Actually, the thing that is so
messed up about our narrative about this is that, like
every piece of it is problematic, right, it is the
case that longer acting opioids cause less reinforcement than shorter
(06:16):
acting ones. Right, when people have to do it every
five minutes, it's really a lot more reinforcing, which is
why the fentinels, which are more shorter acting, are much
more dangerous than something like methodon. So okay, Perdue lied,
and they also claimed that OxyContin acted for twelve hours
when it actually only works for eight, which was an
(06:38):
outright lie. But the thing that people really misunderstand about
the opioid crisis is that eighty percent of people who
misuse prescription opioids do not have a prescription for them. Right.
Eighty percent of the people who are getting in trouble
are not prescribed these drugs. So it wasn't like, oh,
I went to my doctor and my doctor turned me
(07:00):
to an addict. That is not what happened in the
vast majority of cases. The other reason that this is
the case is because ninety percent of addiction starts when
people are in their teens or early twenties, and most
people with chronic pain, speaking in broad generalities, are middle
aged or older. If you've gotten to the point of
(07:20):
being middle aged or older without developing any addictions, your
odds of developing one are indeed less than one percent.
The reality is people have different levels of risk, and
the level of risk that you experience in medical care
when you are older and don't have a prior addiction
is very different from the risk that is encountered by
(07:44):
people who are using drugs recreationally. And so if you
look at people who try heroin, the addiction rate there
is about ten to twenty percent. And why is that?
It's partially because who tries heroin People who are serious
risk takers, people who have just given up. So you're
already selecting for people who are at high risk before
(08:05):
they even take the drug. It's really important to recognize this,
not to say that like, oh, people in pain can
never get addicted. No, it's just to say addiction is
much more than exposure, and if we continue to see
it as exposure, we will end up doing exactly what
we're doing, which is we have cut the medical opioid
supply by sixty percent or more, and we did most
(08:28):
of that by cutting off people who were on high
doses for long term. And what do we find out
when we do that to people? They are four times
more likely to die of overdose or suicide. So we
have made it much worse. And if you just look
at the numbers, opioid prescribing starts falling significantly in twenty eleven.
(08:49):
If you look at the line on the graph of
overdose death, it's going way up as the medical supply
goes down. In fact, more people are dying somewhere right
and so like right exactly, and we're following in the
same cycles that we always have. When the crack epidemics
started coming off, it's like, there's a problem. Things are happening.
What are we going to do about it. Let's get
(09:11):
rid of essentially treatment and just cracked on these people
and throw them in prison. You saw this in the
nineteen twenties with hair when doctors are pleading, please let
us continue to prescribe to these individuals or we're just
gonna have millions of addicts. And you're seeing the exact
same thing with this opiated epidemic. And yeah, may if
you could kind of like talk about that shift. Because
we did see that opioid overdoses were going up, we
started blaming the pharmaceutical companies and oxycoton being out there
(09:35):
and how that was a gateway into all these other
worst behaviors. And you slowly started seeing states put together,
you know, inventory lists of who's prescribing how much. Well,
I mean, the thing is that we're lying. We are
claiming that now that it's white people who we see
as addicted, we're not using the criminal justice system, and
that's not true. What you see is we're not criminalizing
(09:57):
people directly. We're just cutting off their source of medical opioids.
So the people who were going to pill mills mostly
did not get arrested. The people who ran the pill
mills did get arrested, but the customers were just left.
That created this disaster. Some of the reporting in this
area focuses on how when the pill mills got shut down,
(10:21):
a lot of gangs began introducing heroin to rural areas
where it previously hadn't been. Yeah, we had a golden
opportunity every time we shut a pill mill down to
prescribe medical opioids, just to keep people from entering withdrawal
until we can stabilize themselves. Like you had all these
people's names, you have a database, you shut down a
(10:43):
pill mill, it's like these are the people that are
on these pills, like right here, Yeah, Like it's it's
like you know, you don't usually get a list of
customers from Yeah, yeah, yeah, a ledger, and the ledgers
aren't releasing Christian names of all the clients. Yeah, I
don't believe either. Yeah. And another thing that you said
(11:03):
was the pain patients just turning into heroin buyers or whatever.
That's actually more dangerous for them. If you're a person
who suffers from pain, now you're going to go into
a situation where people know you have money. You probably
can't fight back the best. You may even be getting
a check from the government every month, like you're a
(11:25):
piggy bank rolling up to shark confested waters. It's crazy.
So what often happens in that instance is that the
pain patients don't turn to the illegal market, but turned
to a gun and die. And I have heard many
horrible stories. One of them I remember specifically where this
(11:47):
guy got cut off by his doctor and his wife
held his hand while he shot himself because she knew
that he couldn't live like that. It's just who has
helped by this. It's all about let's get the numbers down.
It has nothing to do with let's actually help people.
And you know they think, like, well, we can show
(12:09):
that we reduced opioid prescribing by x percent. Right, well, great,
do the patients die? Yeah? The thing that's always never
brought up is patient outcome, is that becoming better with
these things? And I kind of want to nail down
on that because you mentioned the reductions and prescriptions. What
is causing this vast reduction and prescriptions, Like, what are
(12:29):
the actual factors going into denying people essentially the care
that they Yeah, well, so what basically is happening is
that the law is really vague. According to a nineteen
nineteen Supreme Court decision, it is not legitimate medicine to
prescribe for the comfort of somebody with addiction. It's fine
to prescribe for their comfort if they have pain, but
(12:52):
not if they have addiction. And this is sort of
made into the Controlled Substances Act. And right now we
have doctors who are literally being prosecuted, you did, for
prescribing to people when they believed that they were treating pain.
But the DA says it's overex dose, which was in
the CDC guidelines, and therefore it's not legitimate medicine, and
(13:12):
they are unconsciously becoming drug dealers. So the easy way
to deal with this is just not prescribe. And what
doctor is going to risk their license or their freedom
because some of these really difficult patients that they don't
really want to deal with it anyway, because chronic pain
is really hard to treat. We can just you know,
I'm sorry, we don't use opiods anymore. Go to a
(13:34):
pain management clinic and they have waiting lists and are
not available locally in a lot of places. And also
if you're a patient and you travel to get your
pain care, that's a red flag. So the prescription drug
monitoring thing will flag you, and the pharmacists will say
I won't feel your prescription because you went to a
doctor in California instead of New York. It's terrified a
(13:56):
lot of doctors who would otherwise just maintain these patients
into cutting them off and just getting them out of
their practice. However they can. You know, I've heard about
quite a few good doctors who thought they were doing
the right thing. Sometimes they got fooled by people with addiction.
But doctors don't have a wide detector anymore than police
(14:16):
people do. Right, But again, if I fool you and
get drugs from you and going overdose. Why is that
your fault, right MAYA. One of the things that sticks
out to me is how you make a separation between
what you say are the high risk drug users addicts
versus people who actually have pain and need some type
(14:38):
of relief. And I think when people hear about the
world drugs, they think, you know, that doesn't have anything
to do with me. I'm not a drug user. We're
in the suburbs, My kids are good. You know what
I'm saying. The only thing I'm addicted to it Starbucks. Yeah,
lock those people up for as long as you can,
throw away the key, take away their drugs anyway necessary.
But I think everybody, at some stage in their life
(15:00):
it is going to come to a point where you
might have somebody in your family who has cancer. You
might have somebody who suffered like we spoke about earlier
tragic accident. And this is when I kind of realize, like, oh,
the War on drugs affects everybody, just it may not
have affected you yet. And this is one of those
instances where you can kind of clearly see that absolutely,
(15:23):
I mean, prescribing of opioids for terminal cancer has fallen
by forty during this period, and the CDC guidelines explicitly
exempted both cancer and sickle cell and you can be
prone to having strokes if you have that, and people
go into hospital and they are having a stroke and
(15:46):
the doctors think they're overdosing and they don't treat the stroke,
and if they don't have an advocate there, they can
die of that. I hear from these people all the time,
like from people with chronic pain and people with terminal pain,
where the pharmacist laughs at them. And one of the
things I've really tried to do is connect the harm
(16:06):
reduction addiction community with the chronic pain patient community, because
we really should be both on the same side. Right.
It's not that the people with addiction want nobody to
ever have opioids. I mean, one of the things that
I think is crazy is that like, Okay, you're in
the hospital, you get opioids. You're not going to grow
a drug dealer on the way out, right, Like, you know,
(16:28):
it's not the exposure to euphoria that turns people into
people with addiction. It's the lack of stuff in the
rest of their life exactly. Clayton wasn't cheap to get
so we had to cut a couple commercials. We'll be
right back. Somebody got a payment. Hi. I'm Jason Flam
(16:52):
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(17:15):
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(17:36):
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Although she had never previously possessed or sold an illegal substance,
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(17:56):
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(18:20):
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(18:48):
Can you talk a little bit about your journey year
experience and you know what worked for you and what
do you think is the most critical aspect that I
think they'll be helpful for people to really realize like
what works and what doesn't. A very short version would
be that I was a really geeky, kind of aspy
sort of kid, and I felt really disconnected from people
(19:08):
and Drugs were the first interest that I had. Like
previous ones involved things like opera and science fiction, drugs
were a thing that other people actually did want to
hear me talk about. In fact, they still do, you know.
So that led to some issues, eventually led to me
getting arrested, getting expelled from Colombia, and all kinds of
(19:31):
things like Columbia, the college, not the country. I was
about to say, if you got expelled from Colombia for cocaine,
you had quite a done. Yeah, maya were you? Were
you in the Cinelo cartel? No, I'm just kidding. I'm
just kidding. No, No, I mean I was definitely selling
(19:53):
coke in the eighties at Columbia, but not in Colombia.
So anyway, when I got to college, I would is
just like, what do I do with all these prep
school people that I just feel I can't connect to.
I feel like completely less than and unable to figure out,
you know, a way to get together. But if I
had cocaine, I got invited to the parties and all
(20:15):
of the things. You know. Then I got suspended from school,
and then I decided I'd already ruined my life, so
I may as well do heroin, and that did not help,
although at first it seemed like it helped. Because part
of the reason that we have our own brain opioids,
indogenous opioids in our heads, is to make social connections soothing, right,
(20:37):
And so when you feel like the warmth of a hug,
or you look at a cute baby, or you see
your beloved person, that's opioids. That's our natural opioids doing
their natural job and making you feel warm, safe, loved,
and comfortable. And so somebody who doesn't have that social
connection and feels really isolated suddenly experiences that at not surprisingly,
(21:01):
they're going to love it, and not surprisingly, it can
cause a problem. And so I basically declined from there.
I got arrested. I continue to use for another two years. Yeah,
I was like shooting up forty times a day. At
the end, I weighed eighty pounds. I looked terrible, I
felt terrible, and I eventually just realized that I am
(21:23):
addicted and I need help, and so I called my
parents and got into treatment. Basically, I had to stop
at court because I had a court date that day
and I knew my dad would be there, and I said,
I'm getting help. This is not working, and I then
chose to go to treatment, and they have been in
recovery since. The thing is that we can't base policy
(21:45):
on anecdote. The treatment that I went through was your
traditional twenty eight day, twelve step based treatment, and I
was told this is the only way, and if you
don't do this, the only alternative is jails, institutions, and death.
So I did this and I managed to stay in recovery.
And one of the things that really does help people
(22:05):
get into recovery is social support. And I got a
lot of social support from those programs, which I attended
every day for at least five years. So am I
going to say, well that's what everybody should do, no,
because that really doesn't work for a lot of people, right.
And I mean, if you weren't at Columbia or other places,
if you were just a kid in Harlem or Queens
(22:26):
or something else and you get arrested, you know, you're
not getting the opportunities to even deal with any of
this stuff. And you know, I was extremely lucky. One
of the reasons that I do the things that I
do is because when I got arrested, I was facing
fifteen to life a felony under the Rockefeller Laws for cocaine.
And I'm a white woman, and I was also at
(22:49):
an Ivy League school, and I had family, and I
could show the judge after I came out of treatment,
I went from this sort of eighty pound, very scary
looking person covered with acts to somebody who had hope
in my eyes again. And she saw that, and she said,
I want to try to keep you out of prison,
and she went to bat for me, even though the
(23:09):
prosecutors were kind of like, well, we're not locking enough
white people. So oftentimes, because this thing dragged out out
of a four or five years, oftentimes I would be
the only white defendant in the courtroom. And it's just
fucked up. I'm sorry. I hope I'm allowed to say that.
It's just like wrong, and I feel that like everybody
should have the opportunities that I had, and that taking
(23:32):
stuff away from people is the exact opposite of what
you need to do, when basically addiction is a cry
for help right here, already down like you're already trying
to scratching claws. I think, let's say it's a situation
where you're in poverty, that's one hole you're in. Now
you're addicted to drugs. That's another hole that you're in.
Now you get a resident, you get a felony on
(23:53):
top of that, and like, now, what jobs are you
gonna get? What chance do you have out of getting
out of any of these holes? When your three holes
deep and then you've got something stamped on you that
basically prevent you from ever being able to make anything
out of yourself. Well, I'm happy to speak to this.
So right now, Colorado decided to create a felony for
(24:15):
possession of fentanyl. And what that means is you have
all kinds of disabilities in the future because it makes
it really hard to get a job, It makes it
really hard to get housing, It makes it really hard
to find a partner, It makes it hard to do
all of the things that we do that can actually
(24:36):
get us out of addiction. It makes it much harder
to recover. It increases self hatred, it stigmatizes you, and
it adds all of these things such as not being
allowed to get housing and not being allowed to get
food stamps. And it's infinite punishment. And we're in the
midst of the spentel crisis. We have felonized drug possession
(24:58):
in many states for many years. It did not work.
It does not work. This is not what works, and
yet we're still pushing back into this ancient, harmful stuff. Yeah,
I got a question. I'm sure you said a lot
of times you were the only white person in these courtrooms.
What was something white defendant? That's yeah, it was white.
(25:21):
But on the other side of now we hang out
of court, right, So, um, what was something that was it?
Anything that you noticed in the difference of how you
were handled in the courtroom as opposed to some of
the other defendants that were there that might have been
black or brown. Well, that's I mean, that's the thing.
I just saw people hugging their families and going away
(25:44):
for like fifteen years. It was horrible. Most of the
court appearances that I had were what's known as calendar dates,
and you basically just have to sit there and wait
through other people's cases till they get to yours. And
so yeah, like I mean, I had a private lawyer.
I just had an enormous amount of privilege, and it
just like it just broke my heart to see this.
It just wasn't right. And the court that I was
(26:08):
in actually was a special narcotics court, so most of
the people there were just being sent for dealing. It
was just horrifying. The whole system needs to be started
in a better way from the ground up, because this
is not justice. It's just prejudice. Right. It wasn't some
kind of medical decision that went into, Okay, we'll make
(26:29):
cigarettes legal and we'll make marijuana illegal, because you couldn't
make a science based decision on that. That had to
be racism, because it's just crazy, like one of those
drugs kills fifty percent of its long term users. The
other drug is not associated with reductions in lifespan at all,
and that's the one that's illegal. I guess the thing
I think about is the opioid epidemic. We touched on
(26:51):
it a little bit. I know people in the black
community like, oh, it's an epidemic now because it's affecting
those people. But I think if it's getting people's eyes
and is making people that ordinarily weren't looking at drug
addicts or users as human beings, then in a strange
kind of messed up way, it's almost a good thing.
(27:12):
It's almost a good thing. If we could get these
conversations open. If we could get these these talks going
about you know, harm reduction and actually helping people, I
think that's one good thing that's coming out of the negativity. Yeah,
and I mean I'm glad you said that, because it's
if we get towards more compassionate and caring and respectful
(27:32):
treatment for people with addiction, not only will we have
a more humane society, we will also have more effective treatment. Well. Well, Maya,
this has been amazing. Again. I think we could have
talked to you for another three hours. This could have
been its own podcast series just on this. I want
to thank you again for your time and sharing your
story with us and your expertise on this issue. And
(27:54):
you just don't realize the consequences of some of these
issues and how the people that really need help and
assistance are just not getting it anymore. Again, thank you, Bye,
I really appreciate this. And yeah, hopefully well to sing
it against in. Thank you, Thank you so much. We
have a few bills to pay, so we're gonna go
(28:14):
to a couple of commercials right now. Wow, Right off
the bat, the thing that's stuck with me since that
interview was the story about the man and his wife
(28:37):
holding each other's hands as he put a gun to himself,
till himself because he was aggressively weaned off of opiates,
the only thing that was actually giving him a quality
of life for chronic back pain after a car accident. Yeah,
and he didn't go the illegal route, which was something
that she said, She said, most of them don't turn
(28:57):
to the legal route. They turned to the gun, and
he turned to the gun. And this is prime example.
Like we say, this affects everybody, and it impacts everybody,
and so much of the stuff we've been talking about
has been addicts, and we look at these people as
drug users and criminals, and I think this one just
(29:19):
kind of hits home. You know, sometimes we don't really
have names or faces to go with these people, and
we were able to, you know, find obituary for j. O. Lawrence,
age fifty eight, of Hendersonville, Tennessee, passed away suddenly on
March second, twenty seventeen. And you know, I think it's
important just to say who he was to the people
(29:42):
that cared about the most. I mean, he was a
proud father, devoted husband, He has daughters, he has brothers,
he has This is a person that was important to
the people in his life and is survived by his wife,
Meredith Lawrence, who was arrested for assisting in his suicide
on probation. That's the craziest thing. Yeah, she literally has
(30:05):
just lost the love of her life, the person that was,
you know, trying to support their family this and she
got caught up in the crone because of that. I mean,
if you don't think that's just screwed up, that's a
double blow to that family. And both blows came from
the war on drone. Yeah, instead of being like what
(30:25):
is happening where we allowed for that to be the
most logical decision for this man in his head and
his family. Right, So we said, oh, okay, the problem's
not the laws. The problem is this woman who held
her husband's hand while I shot himself because he was
in too much pain. Yeah, it's insane, definitely backwards man.
(30:46):
It's it just gets frustrating and like it's like this
one any of us could be in this situation easily,
car accident, bad injury, sports, bicycling, whatever, picking up a
frigging box like woral world is shipping now claying Like
I wake up with stuff and I'm like, why is
why is that sort like what's going on here? And
I'm not doing anything like yeah my joints. Craig very loud, Yeah,
(31:07):
I thought I got shot this morning. It was my shoulder. Yeah,
I'd lay down. Yeah. I mean I read this quote
from the doctor to that guy and the last thing
he said was my patient's quality of life is not
worth risking my practice or my license. Over we're forcing
doctors to essentially remove a quality of life because they
(31:31):
feel that they're going to be heliable and they will.
I mean doctors have been criminally charged, not ones that
are trying to run pill mills or anything, just trying
to prescribe care. And we have these guidelines, and you know,
the guidelines we're supposed to be just kind of like
advisory for doctors to kind of show, and though obviously
became law and a lot of states, and we're allowed
to essentially target doctors who were prescribing above those guidelines,
(31:52):
around those guidelines, but cops can get at those lists
of people that have PC. That's a crazy thing too,
Like you think you're you're here medical informations like protected. No,
it ain't. The FEDS think that they can get it regardless,
and then a couple states require a warrant, but the
other ones it's just we know what you're being prescribed,
who's prescribing it, and the last thing you want to
be is on the top of that list as a doctor.
(32:14):
It's crazy. And so luckily they're trying to change some
of the laws around that, and also the CDC stopped
labeling guidelines for like amounts and they just said doctors
use your caution and discretion to go about this. And
then that allows for prosecutors if someone's running a pill
mill and has intent is acting like a drug dealers
selling is off, then they're still able to prosecuting. They
don't need this at all. It just makes it easier.
(32:36):
We just have to figure out this line at some point.
And I want to thank Maya for coming out and
talking to us and taking the time to hopefully educate
a lot of you all on this, because I think
there's misconceptions about opiates and how they need to be utilized,
and I think, you know, people went crazy when they
first came out and they were pumped down the system,
and then we try to go complete the other way,
(32:58):
and we're seeing the effects of that, and the CDC
can change their guidelines, but states still have the laws
in there. Prosecutors are still going to use these to
prosecute doctors. It's going to have a chilling effect on prescriptions.
I mean, terminally ill cancer patients can't get opiates last
thirty days of the life. They're just in immense pain, right,
you know, coming to terms with the final days and
(33:19):
reconciling with their family, are saying goodbye and everything. If
if you could make it to where I could talk
to my family in these last few days without being
in excruciating pain, are being extremely exhausted, that's the least
you can give those people, all right, Well, on that
real happy note, like all our episodes and not all
(33:41):
our episodes in like the beginning of up. But it's okay,
we'll try, we'll try together, we'll try to throw something
in there a little bit more. But with that, you know,
I'm I'm Greg Glad, I'm Clayton English and thanks for listening.
Make sure you follow the War on Drugs podcast so
(34:01):
you don't miss any new episodes or any of our
quick fixed bonus content. I don't know if it actually
helps the Maybe if you follow it and unfollow it
and then follow it again. If we get two that
don't count, I don't know. Maybe you never know. Michael's
mess with the algorithm a bit. We'll see. Just give
it a shot. What's what's the harm? But we'll be
(34:23):
back next week with another episode of War on Drugs.
Until then, thanks for listening. Executive producers for War on
Drugs are Jason Flam and Kevin Wards. Senior producer is
Michael Epstein. Editing by Nick Massetti and Michael Epstein, Associate
producer and mix and mastering by Nick Massetti. Additional production
by Jeff Clapburn and Anna mcintee. Be sure to follow
(34:45):
the show on all social media accounts you know what
they are, Instagram, Twitter, Facebook at lava like molten Lava
for good. You can follow me on Twitter at Greg Gloud.
That's it great, that's it. There's nothing, there's nothing fancy
about me. It was available, it always will be. No
one wants to go out in there. Yeah, so you
(35:07):
never have to go one. Two, You never have to
go to Greg Glove, never having in my life. Yeah yeah,
it's me and my dad are the only two Greg
lads in an entire world. Is your dad's Gregory Glood
doesn't have a Twitter. Oh he even gets crazier than that.
So oh yeah, he doesn't have Twitter. Yeah, he couldn't
get on Twitter. He tried. But the nice thing was
I never had to buy a triple A membership when
I was growing, right because I just used my dad's
(35:29):
name for everything, any membership or anything that he had
if I got in trouble, Hey, greg Old right here. Yeah,
it's been perfect right, you be grown not since you
were six? Yeah, exactly. Why does this kid have his
own Costco card? You have Twitter, Instagram where he didn't
work with, you know, just just Instagram over here. Man.
You know I don't have a Twitter. Okay, you know
(35:49):
how I feel about that. I know how you feel. Yeah,
but you can definitely follow me at Clayton English on Instagram.
Warren Drugs is a production of Lava for Good Podcasts
in association with Signal Company Number one. I'm Greg Glaude
and I'm Clayton English. Thanks for listening. M
Clayton. What if I told you a medical doctor could
prescribe legal drugs and be charged as a drug trafficker.
A doctor like you're talking about a real doctor? Yeah,
medical doctor, not a dealer. A doctor not a dealer.
A new law means doctors are now only able to
write a prescription for a three day supply of opioids, or,
(00:24):
if medically necessary, seven days. Well, I mean, the thing
is that relying eighty percent of the people who are
getting in trouble are not prescribed these drugs. Directer regulations
aimed to stop people from misusing prescription drugs are leaving
patients who use opioids responsibly with greater challenges to get
their medication. But we have made it much worse and
more people are dying. If I didn't have just a
(00:47):
little bit that I can, I can't even imagine what
I would do. I understand that people overdosed and died,
but I didn't do any of that, and I actually
need the medicine. I'm Greg Glode, and this is the
war on drugs playing. What's going on? Man? What's up? Greg? Doing? Great?
(01:12):
Really excited about this topic. I mean, one of the
things that we've learned is the drug war. You don't
have to be a drug addict, you have to be
in the criminal justice system, you don't have to be
involved in this stuff like it's going to impact you.
And Yeah, we were chatting before and talking about like
being back in high school and starting to hear about
like people taking pills and like these things. You're like,
what is it? And um, you know, I grew up
(01:33):
in a pretty white suburb, you know, outside of Annapolis, Maryland,
And was that your same experience within like the black
community as well, Like listen to this or like how
did this all? When was the first time you heard
about like oxy and opiates? And um, I'm trying to
think back when I first realized what was going on.
I guess as far as like opioid epidemic, you know,
the crack epidemic. Saw that you knew about that it
(01:55):
was prevalent, it was heavy in the black community, and
the opioid like, I don't guess I knew they were opioids.
I just knew people popped pills. Yeah, pill popping. Yet
for me probably going into high school, oxycodon I remember
those never partook, but remember those being a thing very
(02:15):
popular all this stuff around codeine, and then I guess
I didn't realize, like for black people, you know, sir
lean codeine, that's that's also opioid. I think a lot
of times we associate, oh, that's white people's strugs. It's like, no,
it's the same thing. Just want to just liquid it.
It might taste a little bit better. Yeah, yeah, over
ice in a styrofoam cup. It's a slushy. It is delicious.
(02:41):
I have to heat the summer. Have you tried lean? Yeah, yeah,
it'll definitely be a little way in here first. Man,
I would highly uh not recommend going out. I don't
know if I knew it was an epidemic, but I
knew something was going on with as far as people
pill popping and like being a problem. When it was
a kid at my school, I think he wrote my
(03:02):
bus and he was on something, and I think somebody
asked what he was on. He told everybody that he
took the medicine that was for his cat, like it
was a cat trying. I don't know what it, but
I'm like, come on, man, you're gonna grow whiskers. You
don't know what's gonna happen. Man, you're gonna start licking yourself.
It's gonna be weird. So I knew then. I was like,
you may have a problem if you're taking medication that
(03:24):
was prescribed for your cat. Maybe they're getting a good
ship and we're listen, it's probably the same who's making
cat medicine. Nobody's making separate medicine for cats. That's a myth,
but it is like one of those things where like
you think it's something and then you start to learn
about it more and it's something else, because like I
think we all know some of the stories of like
Produe Pharma. They're marketing these opioids, are pushing and pushing
(03:44):
and saying they're not addictive. It can be addictive, and
how people are are using so much when they don't
need to just for the problem. And then you're kind
of like, all right, well let's stop prescribing these things, right,
But what we always do is like instead of just
solving that little problem with a little scalpel, we bring
the fucking machete and we just started hacking everything to bits.
And so now people who actually need this medication to
(04:08):
just function can no longer get it because we have
no idea how just to like solve one problem not
exacerbate another. And so we're going to talk to my
Salabates today. She's an amazing, amazing expert on this issue,
has her own real life experience recovering from addiction and
now works to allow people to understand like what addiction means,
what it is. And she's going to talk about a
lot of the complications now with the regulations and prohibition
(04:30):
of prescription opiates and how that's impacting people. Yeah, there's
gonna be people to abuse everything, and it's just a
shame that some of the people that need it most
got to suffer. And I think you don't have to
be a drug dealer for the port on drugs to
affect you. Yeah, I'm getting a little bit older, Clayton.
I'm sure you've woken up out of bed a couple
of times with you know, backs or something like that.
(04:51):
Are we just one, you know, fenderbender away from needing
some sort of prescription like this? And how's that going
to impact you? You never knowe to you put in
that situation or it's one of your loved ones, right,
you gotta watch an unbearable pain. Yeah, Like I said,
really really excited about this interview myself. It's is one
of the foremost experts on addiction in the world. We're
lucky enough to be able to interview for the War
(05:12):
on Drugs. So everyone, I really appreciate you all listening
and tune in. Let's let's get to it. Welcome to
the War on Drugs Podcast by I'm really great to
have you here. Welcome, Thank you so much for having me.
(05:33):
I think we're living in this almost twilight zone time
with the opoid epidemic, and I see so many parallels
with so many other wars that we fought within narcotics,
but this one's a little bit more unique because you know,
it's actual pharmaceuticals are being created by private entities that
are within those medical communities. I think a lot of
people are familiar with how when oxycon came out, people
(05:54):
were kind of misled on the potential complications of it.
It was seen as a less addictive opioid, which doesn't really,
you know, necessarily exist. Actually, the thing that is so
messed up about our narrative about this is that, like
every piece of it is problematic, right, it is the
case that longer acting opioids cause less reinforcement than shorter
(06:16):
acting ones. Right, when people have to do it every
five minutes, it's really a lot more reinforcing, which is
why the fentinels, which are more shorter acting, are much
more dangerous than something like methodon. So okay, Perdue lied,
and they also claimed that OxyContin acted for twelve hours
when it actually only works for eight, which was an
(06:38):
outright lie. But the thing that people really misunderstand about
the opioid crisis is that eighty percent of people who
misuse prescription opioids do not have a prescription for them. Right.
Eighty percent of the people who are getting in trouble
are not prescribed these drugs. So it wasn't like, oh,
I went to my doctor and my doctor turned me
(07:00):
to an addict. That is not what happened in the
vast majority of cases. The other reason that this is
the case is because ninety percent of addiction starts when
people are in their teens or early twenties, and most
people with chronic pain, speaking in broad generalities, are middle
aged or older. If you've gotten to the point of
(07:20):
being middle aged or older without developing any addictions, your
odds of developing one are indeed less than one percent.
The reality is people have different levels of risk, and
the level of risk that you experience in medical care
when you are older and don't have a prior addiction
is very different from the risk that is encountered by
(07:44):
people who are using drugs recreationally. And so if you
look at people who try heroin, the addiction rate there
is about ten to twenty percent. And why is that?
It's partially because who tries heroin People who are serious
risk takers, people who have just given up. So you're
already selecting for people who are at high risk before
(08:05):
they even take the drug. It's really important to recognize this,
not to say that like, oh, people in pain can
never get addicted. No, it's just to say addiction is
much more than exposure, and if we continue to see
it as exposure, we will end up doing exactly what
we're doing, which is we have cut the medical opioid
supply by sixty percent or more, and we did most
(08:28):
of that by cutting off people who were on high
doses for long term. And what do we find out
when we do that to people? They are four times
more likely to die of overdose or suicide. So we
have made it much worse. And if you just look
at the numbers, opioid prescribing starts falling significantly in twenty eleven.
(08:49):
If you look at the line on the graph of
overdose death, it's going way up as the medical supply
goes down. In fact, more people are dying somewhere right
and so like right exactly, and we're following in the
same cycles that we always have. When the crack epidemics
started coming off, it's like, there's a problem. Things are happening.
What are we going to do about it. Let's get
(09:11):
rid of essentially treatment and just cracked on these people
and throw them in prison. You saw this in the
nineteen twenties with hair when doctors are pleading, please let
us continue to prescribe to these individuals or we're just
gonna have millions of addicts. And you're seeing the exact
same thing with this opiated epidemic. And yeah, may if
you could kind of like talk about that shift. Because
we did see that opioid overdoses were going up, we
started blaming the pharmaceutical companies and oxycoton being out there
(09:35):
and how that was a gateway into all these other
worst behaviors. And you slowly started seeing states put together,
you know, inventory lists of who's prescribing how much. Well,
I mean, the thing is that we're lying. We are
claiming that now that it's white people who we see
as addicted, we're not using the criminal justice system, and
that's not true. What you see is we're not criminalizing
(09:57):
people directly. We're just cutting off their source of medical opioids.
So the people who were going to pill mills mostly
did not get arrested. The people who ran the pill
mills did get arrested, but the customers were just left.
That created this disaster. Some of the reporting in this
area focuses on how when the pill mills got shut down,
(10:21):
a lot of gangs began introducing heroin to rural areas
where it previously hadn't been. Yeah, we had a golden
opportunity every time we shut a pill mill down to
prescribe medical opioids, just to keep people from entering withdrawal
until we can stabilize themselves. Like you had all these
people's names, you have a database, you shut down a
(10:43):
pill mill, it's like these are the people that are
on these pills, like right here, Yeah, Like it's it's
like you know, you don't usually get a list of
customers from Yeah, yeah, yeah, a ledger, and the ledgers
aren't releasing Christian names of all the clients. Yeah, I
don't believe either. Yeah. And another thing that you said
(11:03):
was the pain patients just turning into heroin buyers or whatever.
That's actually more dangerous for them. If you're a person
who suffers from pain, now you're going to go into
a situation where people know you have money. You probably
can't fight back the best. You may even be getting
a check from the government every month, like you're a
(11:25):
piggy bank rolling up to shark confested waters. It's crazy.
So what often happens in that instance is that the
pain patients don't turn to the illegal market, but turned
to a gun and die. And I have heard many
horrible stories. One of them I remember specifically where this
(11:47):
guy got cut off by his doctor and his wife
held his hand while he shot himself because she knew
that he couldn't live like that. It's just who has
helped by this. It's all about let's get the numbers down.
It has nothing to do with let's actually help people.
And you know they think, like, well, we can show
(12:09):
that we reduced opioid prescribing by x percent. Right, well, great,
do the patients die? Yeah? The thing that's always never
brought up is patient outcome, is that becoming better with
these things? And I kind of want to nail down
on that because you mentioned the reductions and prescriptions. What
is causing this vast reduction and prescriptions, Like, what are
(12:29):
the actual factors going into denying people essentially the care
that they Yeah, well, so what basically is happening is
that the law is really vague. According to a nineteen
nineteen Supreme Court decision, it is not legitimate medicine to
prescribe for the comfort of somebody with addiction. It's fine
to prescribe for their comfort if they have pain, but
(12:52):
not if they have addiction. And this is sort of
made into the Controlled Substances Act. And right now we
have doctors who are literally being prosecuted, you did, for
prescribing to people when they believed that they were treating pain.
But the DA says it's overex dose, which was in
the CDC guidelines, and therefore it's not legitimate medicine, and
(13:12):
they are unconsciously becoming drug dealers. So the easy way
to deal with this is just not prescribe. And what
doctor is going to risk their license or their freedom
because some of these really difficult patients that they don't
really want to deal with it anyway, because chronic pain
is really hard to treat. We can just you know,
I'm sorry, we don't use opiods anymore. Go to a
(13:34):
pain management clinic and they have waiting lists and are
not available locally in a lot of places. And also
if you're a patient and you travel to get your
pain care, that's a red flag. So the prescription drug
monitoring thing will flag you, and the pharmacists will say
I won't feel your prescription because you went to a
doctor in California instead of New York. It's terrified a
(13:56):
lot of doctors who would otherwise just maintain these patients
into cutting them off and just getting them out of
their practice. However they can. You know, I've heard about
quite a few good doctors who thought they were doing
the right thing. Sometimes they got fooled by people with addiction.
But doctors don't have a wide detector anymore than police
(14:16):
people do. Right, But again, if I fool you and
get drugs from you and going overdose. Why is that
your fault, right MAYA. One of the things that sticks
out to me is how you make a separation between
what you say are the high risk drug users addicts
versus people who actually have pain and need some type
(14:38):
of relief. And I think when people hear about the
world drugs, they think, you know, that doesn't have anything
to do with me. I'm not a drug user. We're
in the suburbs, My kids are good. You know what
I'm saying. The only thing I'm addicted to it Starbucks. Yeah,
lock those people up for as long as you can,
throw away the key, take away their drugs anyway necessary.
But I think everybody, at some stage in their life
(15:00):
it is going to come to a point where you
might have somebody in your family who has cancer. You
might have somebody who suffered like we spoke about earlier
tragic accident. And this is when I kind of realize, like, oh,
the War on drugs affects everybody, just it may not
have affected you yet. And this is one of those
instances where you can kind of clearly see that absolutely,
(15:23):
I mean, prescribing of opioids for terminal cancer has fallen
by forty during this period, and the CDC guidelines explicitly
exempted both cancer and sickle cell and you can be
prone to having strokes if you have that, and people
go into hospital and they are having a stroke and
(15:46):
the doctors think they're overdosing and they don't treat the stroke,
and if they don't have an advocate there, they can
die of that. I hear from these people all the time,
like from people with chronic pain and people with terminal pain,
where the pharmacist laughs at them. And one of the
things I've really tried to do is connect the harm
(16:06):
reduction addiction community with the chronic pain patient community, because
we really should be both on the same side. Right.
It's not that the people with addiction want nobody to
ever have opioids. I mean, one of the things that
I think is crazy is that like, Okay, you're in
the hospital, you get opioids. You're not going to grow
a drug dealer on the way out, right, Like, you know,
(16:28):
it's not the exposure to euphoria that turns people into
people with addiction. It's the lack of stuff in the
rest of their life exactly. Clayton wasn't cheap to get
so we had to cut a couple commercials. We'll be
right back. Somebody got a payment. Hi. I'm Jason Flam
(16:52):
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(17:15):
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(17:36):
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(17:56):
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(18:20):
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(18:48):
Can you talk a little bit about your journey year
experience and you know what worked for you and what
do you think is the most critical aspect that I
think they'll be helpful for people to really realize like
what works and what doesn't. A very short version would
be that I was a really geeky, kind of aspy
sort of kid, and I felt really disconnected from people
(19:08):
and Drugs were the first interest that I had. Like
previous ones involved things like opera and science fiction, drugs
were a thing that other people actually did want to
hear me talk about. In fact, they still do, you know.
So that led to some issues, eventually led to me
getting arrested, getting expelled from Colombia, and all kinds of
(19:31):
things like Columbia, the college, not the country. I was
about to say, if you got expelled from Colombia for cocaine,
you had quite a done. Yeah, maya were you? Were
you in the Cinelo cartel? No, I'm just kidding. I'm
just kidding. No, No, I mean I was definitely selling
(19:53):
coke in the eighties at Columbia, but not in Colombia.
So anyway, when I got to college, I would is
just like, what do I do with all these prep
school people that I just feel I can't connect to.
I feel like completely less than and unable to figure out,
you know, a way to get together. But if I
had cocaine, I got invited to the parties and all
(20:15):
of the things. You know. Then I got suspended from school,
and then I decided I'd already ruined my life, so
I may as well do heroin, and that did not help,
although at first it seemed like it helped. Because part
of the reason that we have our own brain opioids,
indogenous opioids in our heads, is to make social connections soothing, right,
(20:37):
And so when you feel like the warmth of a hug,
or you look at a cute baby, or you see
your beloved person, that's opioids. That's our natural opioids doing
their natural job and making you feel warm, safe, loved,
and comfortable. And so somebody who doesn't have that social
connection and feels really isolated suddenly experiences that at not surprisingly,
(21:01):
they're going to love it, and not surprisingly, it can
cause a problem. And so I basically declined from there.
I got arrested. I continue to use for another two years. Yeah,
I was like shooting up forty times a day. At
the end, I weighed eighty pounds. I looked terrible, I
felt terrible, and I eventually just realized that I am
(21:23):
addicted and I need help, and so I called my
parents and got into treatment. Basically, I had to stop
at court because I had a court date that day
and I knew my dad would be there, and I said,
I'm getting help. This is not working, and I then
chose to go to treatment, and they have been in
recovery since. The thing is that we can't base policy
(21:45):
on anecdote. The treatment that I went through was your
traditional twenty eight day, twelve step based treatment, and I
was told this is the only way, and if you
don't do this, the only alternative is jails, institutions, and death.
So I did this and I managed to stay in recovery.
And one of the things that really does help people
(22:05):
get into recovery is social support. And I got a
lot of social support from those programs, which I attended
every day for at least five years. So am I
going to say, well that's what everybody should do, no,
because that really doesn't work for a lot of people, right.
And I mean, if you weren't at Columbia or other places,
if you were just a kid in Harlem or Queens
(22:26):
or something else and you get arrested, you know, you're
not getting the opportunities to even deal with any of
this stuff. And you know, I was extremely lucky. One
of the reasons that I do the things that I
do is because when I got arrested, I was facing
fifteen to life a felony under the Rockefeller Laws for cocaine.
And I'm a white woman, and I was also at
(22:49):
an Ivy League school, and I had family, and I
could show the judge after I came out of treatment,
I went from this sort of eighty pound, very scary
looking person covered with acts to somebody who had hope
in my eyes again. And she saw that, and she said,
I want to try to keep you out of prison,
and she went to bat for me, even though the
(23:09):
prosecutors were kind of like, well, we're not locking enough
white people. So oftentimes, because this thing dragged out out
of a four or five years, oftentimes I would be
the only white defendant in the courtroom. And it's just
fucked up. I'm sorry. I hope I'm allowed to say that.
It's just like wrong, and I feel that like everybody
should have the opportunities that I had, and that taking
(23:32):
stuff away from people is the exact opposite of what
you need to do, when basically addiction is a cry
for help right here, already down like you're already trying
to scratching claws. I think, let's say it's a situation
where you're in poverty, that's one hole you're in. Now
you're addicted to drugs. That's another hole that you're in.
Now you get a resident, you get a felony on
(23:53):
top of that, and like, now, what jobs are you
gonna get? What chance do you have out of getting
out of any of these holes? When your three holes
deep and then you've got something stamped on you that
basically prevent you from ever being able to make anything
out of yourself. Well, I'm happy to speak to this.
So right now, Colorado decided to create a felony for
(24:15):
possession of fentanyl. And what that means is you have
all kinds of disabilities in the future because it makes
it really hard to get a job, It makes it
really hard to get housing, It makes it really hard
to find a partner, It makes it hard to do
all of the things that we do that can actually
(24:36):
get us out of addiction. It makes it much harder
to recover. It increases self hatred, it stigmatizes you, and
it adds all of these things such as not being
allowed to get housing and not being allowed to get
food stamps. And it's infinite punishment. And we're in the
midst of the spentel crisis. We have felonized drug possession
(24:58):
in many states for many years. It did not work.
It does not work. This is not what works, and
yet we're still pushing back into this ancient, harmful stuff. Yeah,
I got a question. I'm sure you said a lot
of times you were the only white person in these courtrooms.
What was something white defendant? That's yeah, it was white.
(25:21):
But on the other side of now we hang out
of court, right, So, um, what was something that was it?
Anything that you noticed in the difference of how you
were handled in the courtroom as opposed to some of
the other defendants that were there that might have been
black or brown. Well, that's I mean, that's the thing.
I just saw people hugging their families and going away
(25:44):
for like fifteen years. It was horrible. Most of the
court appearances that I had were what's known as calendar dates,
and you basically just have to sit there and wait
through other people's cases till they get to yours. And
so yeah, like I mean, I had a private lawyer.
I just had an enormous amount of privilege, and it
just like it just broke my heart to see this.
It just wasn't right. And the court that I was
(26:08):
in actually was a special narcotics court, so most of
the people there were just being sent for dealing. It
was just horrifying. The whole system needs to be started
in a better way from the ground up, because this
is not justice. It's just prejudice. Right. It wasn't some
kind of medical decision that went into, Okay, we'll make
(26:29):
cigarettes legal and we'll make marijuana illegal, because you couldn't
make a science based decision on that. That had to
be racism, because it's just crazy, like one of those
drugs kills fifty percent of its long term users. The
other drug is not associated with reductions in lifespan at all,
and that's the one that's illegal. I guess the thing
I think about is the opioid epidemic. We touched on
(26:51):
it a little bit. I know people in the black
community like, oh, it's an epidemic now because it's affecting
those people. But I think if it's getting people's eyes
and is making people that ordinarily weren't looking at drug
addicts or users as human beings, then in a strange
kind of messed up way, it's almost a good thing.
(27:12):
It's almost a good thing. If we could get these
conversations open. If we could get these these talks going
about you know, harm reduction and actually helping people, I
think that's one good thing that's coming out of the negativity. Yeah,
and I mean I'm glad you said that, because it's
if we get towards more compassionate and caring and respectful
(27:32):
treatment for people with addiction, not only will we have
a more humane society, we will also have more effective treatment. Well. Well, Maya,
this has been amazing. Again. I think we could have
talked to you for another three hours. This could have
been its own podcast series just on this. I want
to thank you again for your time and sharing your
story with us and your expertise on this issue. And
(27:54):
you just don't realize the consequences of some of these
issues and how the people that really need help and
assistance are just not getting it anymore. Again, thank you, Bye,
I really appreciate this. And yeah, hopefully well to sing
it against in. Thank you, Thank you so much. We
have a few bills to pay, so we're gonna go
(28:14):
to a couple of commercials right now. Wow, Right off
the bat, the thing that's stuck with me since that
interview was the story about the man and his wife
(28:37):
holding each other's hands as he put a gun to himself,
till himself because he was aggressively weaned off of opiates,
the only thing that was actually giving him a quality
of life for chronic back pain after a car accident. Yeah,
and he didn't go the illegal route, which was something
that she said, She said, most of them don't turn
(28:57):
to the legal route. They turned to the gun, and
he turned to the gun. And this is prime example.
Like we say, this affects everybody, and it impacts everybody,
and so much of the stuff we've been talking about
has been addicts, and we look at these people as
drug users and criminals, and I think this one just
(29:19):
kind of hits home. You know, sometimes we don't really
have names or faces to go with these people, and
we were able to, you know, find obituary for j. O. Lawrence,
age fifty eight, of Hendersonville, Tennessee, passed away suddenly on
March second, twenty seventeen. And you know, I think it's
important just to say who he was to the people
(29:42):
that cared about the most. I mean, he was a
proud father, devoted husband, He has daughters, he has brothers,
he has This is a person that was important to
the people in his life and is survived by his wife,
Meredith Lawrence, who was arrested for assisting in his suicide
on probation. That's the craziest thing. Yeah, she literally has
(30:05):
just lost the love of her life, the person that was,
you know, trying to support their family this and she
got caught up in the crone because of that. I mean,
if you don't think that's just screwed up, that's a
double blow to that family. And both blows came from
the war on drone. Yeah, instead of being like what
(30:25):
is happening where we allowed for that to be the
most logical decision for this man in his head and
his family. Right, So we said, oh, okay, the problem's
not the laws. The problem is this woman who held
her husband's hand while I shot himself because he was
in too much pain. Yeah, it's insane, definitely backwards man.
(30:46):
It's it just gets frustrating and like it's like this
one any of us could be in this situation easily,
car accident, bad injury, sports, bicycling, whatever, picking up a
frigging box like woral world is shipping now claying Like
I wake up with stuff and I'm like, why is
why is that sort like what's going on here? And
I'm not doing anything like yeah my joints. Craig very loud, Yeah,
(31:07):
I thought I got shot this morning. It was my shoulder. Yeah,
I'd lay down. Yeah. I mean I read this quote
from the doctor to that guy and the last thing
he said was my patient's quality of life is not
worth risking my practice or my license. Over we're forcing
doctors to essentially remove a quality of life because they
(31:31):
feel that they're going to be heliable and they will.
I mean doctors have been criminally charged, not ones that
are trying to run pill mills or anything, just trying
to prescribe care. And we have these guidelines, and you know,
the guidelines we're supposed to be just kind of like
advisory for doctors to kind of show, and though obviously
became law and a lot of states, and we're allowed
to essentially target doctors who were prescribing above those guidelines,
(31:52):
around those guidelines, but cops can get at those lists
of people that have PC. That's a crazy thing too,
Like you think you're you're here medical informations like protected. No,
it ain't. The FEDS think that they can get it regardless,
and then a couple states require a warrant, but the
other ones it's just we know what you're being prescribed,
who's prescribing it, and the last thing you want to
be is on the top of that list as a doctor.
(32:14):
It's crazy. And so luckily they're trying to change some
of the laws around that, and also the CDC stopped
labeling guidelines for like amounts and they just said doctors
use your caution and discretion to go about this. And
then that allows for prosecutors if someone's running a pill
mill and has intent is acting like a drug dealers
selling is off, then they're still able to prosecuting. They
don't need this at all. It just makes it easier.
(32:36):
We just have to figure out this line at some point.
And I want to thank Maya for coming out and
talking to us and taking the time to hopefully educate
a lot of you all on this, because I think
there's misconceptions about opiates and how they need to be utilized,
and I think, you know, people went crazy when they
first came out and they were pumped down the system,
and then we try to go complete the other way,
(32:58):
and we're seeing the effects of that, and the CDC
can change their guidelines, but states still have the laws
in there. Prosecutors are still going to use these to
prosecute doctors. It's going to have a chilling effect on prescriptions.
I mean, terminally ill cancer patients can't get opiates last
thirty days of the life. They're just in immense pain, right,
you know, coming to terms with the final days and
(33:19):
reconciling with their family, are saying goodbye and everything. If
if you could make it to where I could talk
to my family in these last few days without being
in excruciating pain, are being extremely exhausted, that's the least
you can give those people, all right, Well, on that
real happy note, like all our episodes and not all
(33:41):
our episodes in like the beginning of up. But it's okay,
we'll try, we'll try together, we'll try to throw something
in there a little bit more. But with that, you know,
I'm I'm Greg Glad, I'm Clayton English and thanks for listening.
Make sure you follow the War on Drugs podcast so
(34:01):
you don't miss any new episodes or any of our
quick fixed bonus content. I don't know if it actually
helps the Maybe if you follow it and unfollow it
and then follow it again. If we get two that
don't count, I don't know. Maybe you never know. Michael's
mess with the algorithm a bit. We'll see. Just give
it a shot. What's what's the harm? But we'll be
(34:23):
back next week with another episode of War on Drugs.
Until then, thanks for listening. Executive producers for War on
Drugs are Jason Flam and Kevin Wards. Senior producer is
Michael Epstein. Editing by Nick Massetti and Michael Epstein, Associate
producer and mix and mastering by Nick Massetti. Additional production
by Jeff Clapburn and Anna mcintee. Be sure to follow
(34:45):
the show on all social media accounts you know what
they are, Instagram, Twitter, Facebook at lava like molten Lava
for good. You can follow me on Twitter at Greg Gloud.
That's it great, that's it. There's nothing, there's nothing fancy
about me. It was available, it always will be. No
one wants to go out in there. Yeah, so you
(35:07):
never have to go one. Two, You never have to
go to Greg Glove, never having in my life. Yeah yeah,
it's me and my dad are the only two Greg
lads in an entire world. Is your dad's Gregory Glood
doesn't have a Twitter. Oh he even gets crazier than that.
So oh yeah, he doesn't have Twitter. Yeah, he couldn't
get on Twitter. He tried. But the nice thing was
I never had to buy a triple A membership when
I was growing, right because I just used my dad's
(35:29):
name for everything, any membership or anything that he had
if I got in trouble, Hey, greg Old right here. Yeah,
it's been perfect right, you be grown not since you
were six? Yeah, exactly. Why does this kid have his
own Costco card? You have Twitter, Instagram where he didn't
work with, you know, just just Instagram over here. Man.
You know I don't have a Twitter. Okay, you know
(35:49):
how I feel about that. I know how you feel. Yeah,
but you can definitely follow me at Clayton English on Instagram.
Warren Drugs is a production of Lava for Good Podcasts
in association with Signal Company Number one. I'm Greg Glaude
and I'm Clayton English. Thanks for listening. M
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