This is an archived article that was published on sltrib.com in 2016, and information in the article may be outdated. It is provided only for personal research purposes and may not be reprinted.
Those press conferences called by law enforcement agencies to showcase their latest haul of illegal drugs usually elicit some guffaws from people who understand the law of supply and demand.
As long as there is a demand, there will be a supply. There's just too much money to be made.
There is some hope, though, of putting some real limits on the supply of one class of drugs, one that has millions of Americans in the grip of addiction and has killed 165,000 of us in the last 15 years.
Or there would be, if the big drug companies that profit from the growing use of opioid painkillers weren't spending more than $100 million a year to stop any legislative efforts to limit the use and abuse of those pills. Because there's just too much money being made.
In Utah alone, campaign contributions from the opioid lobby have topped $1 million over the last 10 years. At least 18 professional lobbyists have been retained or dispatched to plead the drugmakers' cause in Utah.
In many cases, those efforts parallel rival campaigns not only to limit the easy availability of opioids but also proposals to legalize the use of marijuana — death toll: 0 — to, among other things, manage pain, both chronic and acute.
The good news is that, even sailing against that wind, Utah public health officials, health care providers and law enforcement agencies have launched an effort to educate both the medical profession and the general public about the risks of opioid addiction. It goes so far as to suggest that alternate remedies be used for all but the most severe pain.
But even the title of the effort, Use Only As Directed, isn't getting to the root of the problem, which is that the use of those medicines is being directed far too often, often by doctors who specialize in neither pain management nor addiction.
Opioids are the socially acceptable version of heroin. There's no doubt that they perform as advertised, easing severe pain associated with cancer, surgery or serious injuries.
There's also no doubt that the manufacturers of the concoctions — OxyContin, Vicodin, fentanyl — have reaped billions by convincing doctors to prescribe them not just for the most serious short-term pain but also for less serious cases and for patients whose pain is less severe but ongoing.
As outlined by recent reporting by the Associated Press and the Center for Public Integrity, the amount of money poured into fighting proposals that would limit the number of pills any patient could receive, or to require a lot more training for the non-specialists who prescribe enough opioids for nine out of every 10 Americans to have a bottle, makes the dough thrown around by the gun lobby look puny.
As long as there is pain, there will be a market for painkillers. But we have the power to ease the addictive, often deadly, side-effects of one kind of drug if we will stand up to the legal drug pushers at least as forcefully as we fight the illegal ones.