The doctors who are most qualified in making the determination are often the ones with the most legitimate patients taking those drugs but all the legal teams and regulators are completely incapable of differentiating them from the prescription mills (excuse me, "pain management centers").
Could they not check the chart? Is there even a chart anymore?
Slate Star Codex wrote about this: https://slatestarcodex.com/2019/09/16/against-against-pseudo...
Basically, an addict wants to look genuine, so a lot of genuine patients have to put up with stuff designed to cut off addicts. Like the scary "FBI warning" that only shows up if you actually pay for a DVD.
We live in two different computer simulations I guess.
It's much stupider than that.
Addicts want the drug.
So all of the indicators of addiction are actually indicators of wanting the drug.
So anyone who wants the drug is, ipso facto, an addict.
There's no element of addicts trying to look more genuine. Look at that list of red flags:
- Complaining of a need for a drug.
- Asking for more of a drug.
- Asking for a particular drug by name.
- Sometimes taking a drug on your own initiative.
https://intervention911.com/common-signs-of-drug-seeking-beh...
- laiming they need more drugs to replace a lost or stolen prescription
- Misrepresenting their symptoms
- Frequent visits to multiple doctors, including a willingness to travel to a different city or state to see a new physician – a phenomenon called “doctor shopping”
- Unwillingness or inability to provide a complete health history or contact information for previous physicians
It's possible for a non-addicted person to do this, but actual statistics matter.
> Claiming they need more drugs to replace a lost or stolen prescription
Have you really never lost a prescription? I've lost portions of mine once or twice (i.e. I had a week left and lost the bottle). Luckily not having mine is more of an annoyance than anything, but I can empathize for someone in pain who lost theirs. Stealing medications is common in addicts as well, and for every addict that steals a prescription, there's someone that legitimately did have their prescription stolen.
> Misrepresenting their symptoms
If this can be shown objectively, I can't see any way a non-addict would do this. I fear that it sows distrust between the patient and the doctor, though. The doctor is always looking for signs of the patient misrepresenting symptoms, and the patient is always worried that the doctor is going to think that they're misrepresenting their symptoms.
> Frequent visits to multiple doctors, including a willingness to travel to a different city or state to see a new physician – a phenomenon called “doctor shopping”
Uncommon, but it wouldn't be entirely shocking for someone to travel for access to a better doctor. This wouldn't be that out there for someone who has cancer, for example.
> Unwillingness or inability to provide a complete health history or contact information for previous physicians
I've moved a few times in my life. My complete health history probably involves 30 or so doctors if we go back to childhood. I don't think I could even name all of them, much less have contact info for them.
The statistics do matter, but we're talking about subjecting people to pain here. The evidentiary bar should probably be higher than "you did a thing that addicts are statistically more likely to do". I think especially so when the worst case scenario is that we give an addict a fix. I'm not advocating drug use, but the harm caused seems pretty minimal, beyond the cost of administering that dose in a hospital.