For @Harpers, I wrote about the collateral damage of America’s war on opioids: chronic pain sufferers who are being cut off from their medication. It’s a story of bad drug policy, medical abandonment, and the nightmare of living with undertreated pain harpers.org/archive/2018/0… 
I reported the piece from Great Falls, MT, where one of the area’s only pain clinics had forcibly reduced (or cut entirely) the dosages of hundreds of patients—even if they’d been stable on opioids for years, with no signs of misuse or violations of the clinic’s “pain contract”
The fallout was immediate. Patients described their despair, their loss of function. Several mentioned suicide; one man followed through on it. And of course it was the poorest, most vulnerable who were hit the hardest—those unable to pay for expensive alternative therapies
This is a very hard issue. Chronic pain is vexing. Opioids are not the miracle drugs their marketers said they were. The addiction & overdose crisis is real. But there’s another side to the story, and most journalists/politicians are ignoring it in favor of a more tidy narrative
For more on this, see the crucial work of @maiasz @StefanKertesz @DrSeanMackey @LeoBeletsky @tal7291 @slsatel (among many others!)
