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New majority owner of Peak Resorts

JimG.

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I wanted to laugh at this but it's not funny.

I give Oliver a ton of credit for trying to take the truth and
make it easier to process with humor.
 

BenedictGomez

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I wanted to laugh at this but it's not funny.

I give Oliver a ton of credit for trying to take the truth andmake it easier to process with humor

The problem is, it's really not "true", at least, not exactly in the way he's trying to frame it.

It's true that Purdue and a few smaller players were bad actors, so everything in that context is correct.

But to take that info and then LEAP to the conclusion that this is what caused the opioid & heroin problem is wildly incorrect. It's also incorrect to suggest that tons of people legally prescribed the drug from their physician become junkies. It's a complete misunderstanding of the problem. And if you really want to solve a problem, then it needs to be understood in the first place.

The simple story that addiction happens all the time when people get opioids for pain is clearly wrong.

How do we know this — and why is this story so different from the one we hear in the media? For one, the National Household Survey on Drugs has asked about the sources of misused opioids in recent years: this representative survey of tens of thousands of Americans shows that less than a quarter of people who start misusing these drugs obtained them directly from one or multiple doctors. Half of new users, in fact, say they got them from a friend or relative for free.

Secondly, an early study of people being treated for Oxycontin addiction found that 77 percent of them had also taken cocaine—and it's hard to imagine that this was supplied medically or that these pain patients went out in search of a cocaine dealer once they found out how nice opioids are. In addition, only 3.6 percent of people who misuse prescription opioids ever even try heroin. Although 75 percent of heroin users start with prescription opioids these days, very few prescription opioid users actually go on to heroin addiction. And this, again, speaks to the unlikelihood that many prescription pain patients became addicted to heroin without having had a prior history of drug problems.

The idea that patients who take medications as prescribed are the cause of this problem is inaccurate. While the media loves to highlight "innocent victims" who became addicted through medicine, the fact is that this group is a minority.

https://tonic.vice.com/en_us/articl...d-crisis-most-pain-patients-dont-get-addicted
 

Do Work

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The problem is, it's really not "true", at least, not exactly in the way he's trying to frame it.

It's true that Purdue and a few smaller players were bad actors, so everything in that context is correct.

But to take that info and then LEAP to the conclusion that this is what caused the opioid & heroin problem is wildly incorrect. It's also incorrect to suggest that tons of people legally prescribed the drug from their physician become junkies. It's a complete misunderstanding of the problem. And if you really want to solve a problem, then it needs to be understood in the first place.



https://tonic.vice.com/en_us/articl...d-crisis-most-pain-patients-dont-get-addicted





My God. See, this is why I absolutely hate people and the internet. You've just admitted that what I said was true, but you took issue with the severity of the reality I described- and that's fine except you used a goddam VICE article written by a C- middle schooler to back it up.

Even in the damn c&p you posted you don't realize the data you shared agrees with what I said- Those relatives and friends "giving away free Oxys"- WHERE DO YOU SUPPOSE THEY GOT THEM?????? They got them from their doctor, and they had extras because they were over prescribed!

Honestly, the refusal to assign blame to the only sect of society with control over the substance- and whose job it was to make sure this didn't happen is pathetic, and a huge reason it continues to propagate today. PATHETIC.
 

BenedictGomez

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Even in the damn c&p you posted you don't realize the data you shared agrees with what I said- Those relatives and friends "giving away free Oxys"- WHERE DO YOU SUPPOSE THEY GOT THEM?????? They got them from their doctor, and they had extras because they were over prescribed!

No, it doesn't, because it's a minority of the people who get hooked. Which you don't understand. As I and a few others have tried to explain to you, most people aren't "innocently" hooked, most people are active drug seekers.

You also dont understand that most Fentanyl and its' derivatives on the illegal market are coming from OUS sources, not from legally prescribed domestic doctors, OR "given away" after initially legally prescribed.

Put simply, Rx pills are NOT the major problem (despite what the media breathlessly tells you), the lion's share of the problem is illegal **** on the black market and synthetics from basements and barns.
 

cdskier

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My God. See, this is why I absolutely hate people and the internet. You've just admitted that what I said was true, but you took issue with the severity of the reality I described- and that's fine except you used a goddam VICE article written by a C- middle schooler to back it up.

Huh? That article that BG shared was written by an author with some pretty good credentials who has written for many mainstream publications. She's a NY Times Bestselling author as well. Where did you get that it was written by some middle schooler?
 

Do Work

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Huh? That article that BG shared was written by an author with some pretty good credentials who has written for many mainstream publications. She's a NY Times Bestselling author as well. Where did you get that it was written by some middle schooler?


C average middle schooler may have been a bit harsh but if you read my last post your note that while the author attempted to paint the legal pharma sector as blameless by insisting most people got their first dose for free from a friend or family member- but in the same breath trying to say that overprescribing them isn’t the problem... you’ve got a very clear conflict of cause and effect. How else does everyone’s friends and family get all these extra free pills??? Do we just act like it wasn’t a bad doc or bad script because it wasn’t *their* doctor??? It is a disingenuous way to spin that information, IMO.

Also it’s worth noting that I’m not going to sit here and say doctors did ALL of it, but holy crap guys, how do you think we got this far?? It literally HAD to start with bad scripts. That’s what literally created the market in the first place. I don’t understand how people think we got here without a single bad doc or bad script. It’s mind boggling how hard people are working to absolve the one group of people who had control over this stuff from any responsibility to its blatant and widespread abuse. Sad, really. Then again, integrity is a dying attribute so I can’t really be surprised people are shying from even the slightest shadow of culpability.
 

Do Work

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And my final point is that “active drug seekers” are null and void if the people writing scripts and those around them held themselves to the oath they swore. When I say “bad doc” I don’t necessarily mean malicious intent. The post back a ways about someone watching their attending writing a script to a seeker and swallowing the line of bs afterwards made me ill. That type of shoulder shrug is how things like this propagate and they go on every day wherever someone simply can’t be bothered. That would be like me saying “Hey we are supposed to build this chairlift to spec but that’s a real pain, so I’m just going to do it however is convenient for me and the guys today. People will probably die but whatever, they’d die someday anyways.”

We’re handling the potential to ruin lives or improve them, but when what you’re handling is THAT high consequence, the right way is often the very hardest way imaginable.

Mistakes happen for sure and obviously not every script was bad, but casual laziness in handling life and death situations almost always result in the latter, ESPECIALLY with parties seemingly hell-bent on using your wares to die with stop at nothing to erode your safeguards against it... Add to that any systematic efforts to remove those safeguards as almost sure-fire failures. It’s a very scary situation and we need to give credit to all participants, no matter how small the cog when we examine the whole of the machine. Plain honesty dictates that doctors do own a share of the blame in this debacle and we all know it. They don’t own it, but they definitely share it.
 

Domeskier

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while the author attempted to paint the legal pharma sector as blameless by insisting most people got their first dose for free from a friend or family member- but in the same breath trying to say that overprescribing them isn’t the problem... you’ve got a very clear conflict of cause and effect. How else does everyone’s friends and family get all these extra free pills???

Over-prescribing medication does not cause pill sharing, it merely creates the possibility. You need someone who's actually willing to share their extra drugs with friends and families to create the problem the author is describing. And people pushing highly addictive drugs on their friends and families so they can have gave a good time or whatever are far worse actors in this scenario than the doctors or pharmacists who are easy targets to scapegoat.
 

cdskier

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C average middle schooler may have been a bit harsh but if you read my last post your note that while the author attempted to paint the legal pharma sector as blameless by insisting most people got their first dose for free from a friend or family member- but in the same breath trying to say that overprescribing them isn’t the problem... you’ve got a very clear conflict of cause and effect. How else does everyone’s friends and family get all these extra free pills??? Do we just act like it wasn’t a bad doc or bad script because it wasn’t *their* doctor??? It is a disingenuous way to spin that information, IMO.

Also it’s worth noting that I’m not going to sit here and say doctors did ALL of it, but holy crap guys, how do you think we got this far?? It literally HAD to start with bad scripts. That’s what literally created the market in the first place. I don’t understand how people think we got here without a single bad doc or bad script. It’s mind boggling how hard people are working to absolve the one group of people who had control over this stuff from any responsibility to its blatant and widespread abuse. Sad, really. Then again, integrity is a dying attribute so I can’t really be surprised people are shying from even the slightest shadow of culpability.

You're painting far too narrow blame here. If I get a script from a doctor and don't use all the medicine because for whatever reason I decide I don't need it and instead I give it to someone else, that's MY fault, not the doctors. Sorry. Those people that give their pills to someone else need to take responsibility too. My dentist years ago prescribed me Vicodin for a tooth that needed a root canal (10 pills...only a roughly 2 day supply if I took as prescribed every 4 hours). I still to this day (17 years later) have 8 pills left. They didn't end up in anyone else's hand. No one abused them. Why? Because I took responsibility and accountability for the drugs that were prescribed to me (a novel concept, I know). I don't expect doctors to prescribe one pill at a time or follow patients home to make sure they take the pills themselves. Every person along the way needs to share a piece of the responsibility. Do you consider my example a bad script because I have 80% of the pills left? It sounds like a lot, but I really don't think it is when you look at how long it would have lasted if I was in enough pain to take as prescribed.
 

drjeff

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You're painting far too narrow blame here. If I get a script from a doctor and don't use all the medicine because for whatever reason I decide I don't need it and instead I give it to someone else, that's MY fault, not the doctors. Sorry. Those people that give their pills to someone else need to take responsibility too. My dentist years ago prescribed me Vicodin for a tooth that needed a root canal (10 pills...only a roughly 2 day supply if I took as prescribed every 4 hours). I still to this day (17 years later) have 8 pills left. They didn't end up in anyone else's hand. No one abused them. Why? Because I took responsibility and accountability for the drugs that were prescribed to me (a novel concept, I know). I don't expect doctors to prescribe one pill at a time or follow patients home to make sure they take the pills themselves. Every person along the way needs to share a piece of the responsibility. Do you consider my example a bad script because I have 80% of the pills left? It sounds like a lot, but I really don't think it is when you look at how long it would have lasted if I was in enough pain to take as prescribed.
Spot on here. The reality is everyone perceives pain differently. Some people absolutely refuse to take even 1 Advil if they practically have a body part about to fall off, whereas some other people's will react to a paper cut like they're going to die. At times also stigma of something that has been created by words of a friend, or the media, or even pop culture at times can play into one's perception of pain as well.

I can tell you as someone with a DEA number, this presents a dilemma as your trying to manage a patient from initial diagnosis, the treatment itself, and the recovery after.

Fortunately for me and my dental practice, I don't have to treat long duration, chronic pain patients. Managing acute pain, while challenging at times to gauge each patients personal level of pain (what might be a 2 out of 10 pain wise for 1 patient may very well be an 8 out of 10 for another patient), is almost always something that can be successfully treated within 48hrs and as such, a small amount of pain medication.

Additionally on an anecdotal level, whether it's a shift in pain medication perception by the public, or maybe just the cross section of the population that I treat, the amount of people who I see that seem to just be seeking out pain medication has gone to almost none (and there are plenty of local news reports of EMT's or police Narcan revivals, as well as OD deaths in my general geographical area on maybe not a daily basis, but certainly more than 1/2 the days of the week). The reality is that my business partner and I RARELY prescribe pain medication, and haven't done so for years. So if that has created a word of mouth situation amongst local prescription drug seekers that there's zero chance that they're going to get a script from my office, fine by me.

As I have stated before in this thread, this problem isn't a singular issue at it's source. There's a number of factors/variables, and not all the same for each person either, that have come together for a certain subset of the population and has resulted in numerous OD deaths. Oxycontin, and other similar strong opiod pain medications for some, when used properly, are truly a godsend medication. For others, especially if misused, they are a major problem that can take over one's life and potentially rapidly lead them down a fatal path.

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abc

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Quite right.

I’m about to go into a major surgery. And I have a script for Oxy. I know I probably don’t need it as my pain tolerance is naturally high (I just don’t FEEL the pain). But having the script (or the drug) at hand is necessary, in case I react like average people. Should the doctor NOT prescribe it and leave me with a potential for severe pain? Am I not to be trusted that I may resell the drug to “friends”?

After all, I have a $2500 co-pay out of pocket!!!
 

abc

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MJ is a debate for another time but the point was the kid liked to get high and chased bigger and "better" highs and it caught him.

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I think that’s the elephant in the room everyone is tiptoeing around.

Kids like that WILL get hook on SOMETHING. Whatever is the easiest to get at that particular timeframe. The day we “solve” the problem of opioid, is the day the next round of addictive shit enter the market!
 

dlague

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All very true.
But opioids can/will kill or have you addicted on the first dose..
I love whiskey - but I'd never touch opioids.. Because I've seen how fast people get fucked up on it. And helped people get undone from it.. And have lost a few people because of it.. Way more than alcohol.. Which I know is dangerous..

Don't EVER do them... ever.. unless there's no other choice for pain relief..
I had knee surgery and was prescribed an opiod took it twice and I was done. Did not get addicted not even close. Opioids are prescribed by Dentists, Doctors, Surgeons, Practitioners, and Veterinarians. I think they many be over prescribed which can lead to problems, but I also think that it takes the wrong mindset and trouble starts. One of the most commonly used opioids that result in OD is fentanyl and generally illegally obtained. The medical industry has taken steps to limit doses and prescriptions. But like anything there is a black market.

Now Canada is another story. My wife was having a pinched nerve in her upper back while in Banff. They shot here up with cortisone and gave here 50 percocet which was ubsurd and charged us $25 for them. We did not even ask for them.

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Harvey

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Maybe it's arbitrary, but I do see a difference between alcohol and oxy. There are plenty of people who drink moderately, and it's part of a productive life. Not sure that can be said about oxy.

I was given percoset for a broken thumb once about 20(?) years ago. I didn't really know what it was, the doctor told me to be careful, that it was addictive. I said, give me ten and don't refill it if I ask you. I took two of them, I must admit out of curiosity, my thumb didn't really hurt that bad. I never felt any kind of buzz from it and it messed with my stomach. I switched to aspirin and tossed the old outdated percs when our daughter was born.

Thanks for posting this, it's an important topic. I'm going to post this link in our forum too.
 
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