Thread by @RachaelHorning

#cpp The National Pain Strategy is a complete disaster. It’s so transparent, when you spend your life on the sidelines you observe a lot-like gaslighting by policy in service to the War on Drugs. The U.S. NIH has known since the 1970s that opiate pain medicines are safe,

miraculously helpful for most people in pain, and addiction is rare with use. This same society that doesn’t want to have to see bodies with painful illness created the conditions of poverty and despair that led people prone to addiction to start using drugs irresponsibly.

NPS was a plan to make us fit into a tidy box that looks just how the morally, physically, financially superior want everything around them to look. Chronically ill, disabled people frequently in need of medicine to mitigate pain just..."don't look hygenic” if you live in a

perfect world that’s just so. People don't want to be faced with suffering because it reminds them of their own fragility-it's instinct to avoid looking, healthy bodies are designed to forget what terrible pain feels like once it stops. NPS pitched money on junk alternative

science instead of real medicine-people who require treatment with opiates have already tried everything on that stupid list; my god there aren’t even enough hours in the day for all those interventions even if they did improve pain/function.

Does anyone even understand how many different specialists we were expected to see in one month, when we had care? NIH allowed quack psychiatrist zealots, economists and eugenecists in to run their pain research-a total waste of money because it's all useless. It’s rife with

circular logic constructed to uphold their biased foregone conclusions, namely that the cause of every symptom we’re afflicted with is opioids, not the underlying disability and disease. The application of epidemiology to "chronic pain" caused by a thousand different conditions

from degenerative disc to sickle cell disease was one of the dumbest things I've ever seen such intelligent people do. Before NPS? The U.S. was leading ethical excellence in the treatment of pain. After NPS? The absolute destruction is difficult to quantify, it's taken so many

lives, and those of us still hanging on as long as we can…we’re even less pretty than we were before. So much beautiful, carefully crafted science built on the solid foundation of human understanding was completely abandoned and relegated it to the trash fire. Possibly the worst

outcome of this foray into eugenics isn’t the damage done to our lives, but the damage done to medicine for the next generation. Not only do they have to inherit dystopian wreckage, but they won't even have medicine practiced by compassionate stoics, elevating the science of

humanity, because most of them will have been exterminated in the War on Drugs. What kind of harms will these conditions inflict on my daughter's being, and when it does, who will she have to turn to?