Junction

As a long time chronic pain patient I can fully attest to the accuracy of this movie. In 2006 I had a CT Scan of my lower back and they found advanced degenerative disc disease and arthritis in my neck. One day in '06 I went to the ER because the pain was so bad and they put me on IV Dilaudid and wrote a script for Vicodin. This was before the opioid epidemic when doctors were pushing Percocet and Vicodin like candy. They would prescribe pain meds based on a pain chart of 1-10. I believe Purdue Pharma was responsible for that.

After returning to the ER several times in a few months span they told me I need to go to a pain specialist and NOT back to the ER for pain meds.

I started seeing a pain specialist out of pocket because I left my job and had no health insurance at the time. Each monthly visit to the pain Dr cost about $1,200, visit and meds included. This pain specialist started me on Fentanyl patches 25 mcg/hr AND Dilaudid pills. Over the next year or so the doctor increased my Fentanyl patch dose from 25 mcg to 100 mcg /hr (that's 10mg, enough to knock out a horse). Obviously with the rapid increases in dosage I was addicted to opioid pain meds. For the next few years I ended up throwing away over $200,000 on pain meds.

In 2013 I got health insurance with MediCal and by then the opioid crisis was real. Doctors started cracking down on pain meds and the Gov started cracking down on big pharma for their role in this crisis. I lost over $200,000 because of opioids that was pushed on me and got me addicted. Life was brutal, just trying to get by day by day, hour by hour even.

Under my new health plan I was assigned a new pain specialist who started tapering me down off the Fentanyl patches over a 2 years period. Remember that I was also taking Dilaudid previously and the new doctor switched me to Percocet with a taper plan.

By 2018 I was off the Fentanyl patches and just on the Percocet with a steady dose regimen and slow tapers over the next several years.

Into the 2020's the opioid epidemic reached a boiling point and most pain doctors by then stopped prescribing opioid pain meds to new patients and tapered existing pain patients off what they were taking. Substance abuse was out of control doctors started treating patients with methodone or Suboxone (Suboxone is buprenorphine with nalaxone) and works by eliminating the crave for pain meds since it works to similar to opioid pain meds by binding to the pain receptors in the brain.

In 2022 I was given Suboxone after over 15 years of being addicted to pain meds and missing out on so much of my life.

This movie really hits home the reality of the opioid epidemic where the father and CEO of a Pharma company and the son who is addicted to opioid pain meds, and comes full circle when a patient who testified at a hearing said to the CEO that he specifically is at fault for being part of the cause of this crisis saying that he was killing people. At that same moment the CEOs son died from an overdose.

I wish more was done to combat this crisis by helping people who are substance abusers as well as genuine chronic pain patients like I was/am. I hope a clean bill can pass in Congress that can help solve this epidemic or at least take it on head on.