People Who Have Never Experienced Back Pain Have No Business Making Opioid Policy

Economist Steven Horwitz writes in USA Today about President Trump’s proposal to reduce legal opioid prescriptions by one third. Such a drastic reduction would inevitably harm people like Horwitz, who relates his experience with excruciating back pain and how opioids were essential to relieving his agony and helping his body heal:

People who wish to drastically limit access to opioids need to know the reality of this kind of pain. Getting out of bed took 10 minutes or more because even one small wrong movement while getting to a sitting position would cause severe back spasms, making me shudder with pain. Walking around my house required balancing myself on walls and door frames.


The pain from sitting down and standing up from the toilet required that I use a chair to hold my weight like one would use a walker. I had visions of being found in the bathroom, stuck on the toilet or even unable to get up off of the floor. Every little twist and turn of my body risked those spasms and shuddering.


Eventually I realized my mistake and got a prescription for opioids. The quality of my life quickly and dramatically improved, as within two or three days, the pain was reduced substantially and my mobility and mood were significantly better. I could walk comfortably and hug my kids again.


It’s important to understand that this kind of debilitating pain not only causes unnecessary suffering, it prevents patients from healing. It takes every bit of energy you have to fight it, and your body has little to nothing left to use to heal. Some medical professionals call pain “the fifth vital sign” because of the way in which it matters for a patient’s health. Opioids enabled me to relax, to sleep and to heal.

I too am one of the people Trump’s policy might harm.


I suffer from episodic back pain. Everything Horwitz describes I have experienced. If anything, I would say he understates the agony. In my experience, the pain can be more like torture—as if someone were deliberately trying to inflict as much pain as possible, for the purpose of breaking me emotionally and leaving me trembling in fear of its return.


Like Horwitz, I did not want to treat my back pain with opioids. I had previously used them to recover from knee surgery and I disliked the experience so much that after my second knee surgery, I refused them. Like Horwitz, I feared addiction. So I tried stretching. I tried physical therapy. I tried non‐​prescription analgesics.


Nothing worked until I broke down—until the pain broke me—and I tried opioids. They worked. They eliminated my pain and, as Horwitz says, that allowed me to heal. My pain could come back at any time, and so I too could be one of the people Trump’s policy would leave to suffer in excruciating pain. 


People who have never experienced back pain have no business making opioid policy.