By Arianne Grand-Gassaway.

This is a cry for help. No, not because I’m considering suicide.

This is a cry for help for millions in pain. It’s a cry for those who are taking their own lives to end the agony they’ve been told that they just need to learn to accept. It’s a rallying cry for people to start talking about what’s happening, what has been happening for years now, to people with serious illnesses and injuries in this country. Virtually no one is talking about this in the public forum. This is the other side of the ‘opioid crisis’.

There are people right now watching the news, rightfully outraged when they see profiling and discrimination, human rights abuses, violations of civil liberties and civil rights. These are often the same people who will usually not tolerate torture even when it applies to terrorists or criminals; people outraged and outspoken about preventing suicide when they see a celebrity has taken their own life. All of these things are happening to people in pain as I write this yet there is no public outcry, there are few even expressing concern. Most of you will even think it hyperbole for me to use terms like torture, or profiling and discrimination. I assure you, it’s not hyperbole in any sense.

There is a chilling effect that has set in. It is now virtually impossible to separate the word OPIOID from addiction because the accepted narrative has made those terms synonymous. People have been misled by the intentional and masterfully crafted agenda regarding opiates. People suffering with chronic and intractable pain have become today’s lepers, untouchables, the invisibles, and people in pain are now looked at with suspicion and blatant contempt by medical ‘professionals’, friends, and even family members.

No one is talking about the tragedy that is unfolding as more and more people in pain are killing themselves. They are doing so when they are denied the medicines they need to mediate painful conditions and they feel that death is the only option left for them to end that pain. I’ve even had people call the stories of these suicides nothing more than anecdotal. In my opinion, that statement is a shining example that exemplifies the willful ignorance regarding what is happening to the most vulnerable among us.

I get it. It’s hard to imagine someone living with pain all the time, especially the kind of pain that doesn’t respond to the drugstore standbys. For those not afflicted it’s almost impossible to imagine unending, constant, unrelenting pain and how it affects every aspect of one’s life. It’s difficult to understand how uncontrolled pain spirals into other serious health issues like sudden heart attacks, strokes, hypertensive crisis, and even cancer; or to wrap your head around the emotional ramifications, the stress, the sorrow, the anxiety at losing everything you once were. But I assure you, even though you may not be able to imagine it, it’s all too real for those of us who are living it.

No one has been saved by the current hysteria, or by knee jerk policies and practices that become more prohibitive and restrictive by the minute. Despite needed prescribed medicines being denied to those who benefit by taking them, OD deaths due to illicit drug use continues unabated. We are bearing witness to another doomed to fail drug war and pain patients are merely the acceptable collateral damage.

This is a cry for help. The ‘opioid’ narrative needs to change. Patients with chronic pain due to serious health issues should be exempt from legislation or ‘guidelines’ We need to get this right

Arianne Grand describes herself as an old soul living in the mountains of California. In 2010 she sustained a C-spine injury in a tree cutting accident which causes constant, debilitating pain due to spinal stenosis, disc degeneration, and radiculopathy . Arianne also battles with Myalgic Encephalomyelitis, Fibromyalgia, and suffered with Adenomyosis for over 20 years.

Subscribe to our blog via email