April Grove Doyle, a 40-year-old single mom with metastatic breast cancer, pulled her car to the side of the road. Her face was flushed and her eyes puffy from crying, but she looked into the phone mounted on her dashboard and pressed the record button.

“So, I’m just leaving my pharmacy,” she said, taking a breath to steady herself. “I’m not, I’m not—I’m frustrated, and that’s why I’m crying. I get pain pills, maybe every two, three months, OK? I can make one monthly prescription of pain pills last two or three months because I don’t really take it unless I absolutely need it. And when you have metastatic cancer in your bones, you need it. Because sometimes the pain is so much you can’t even function. And I just want to function.”

After another deep breath, Doyle explained: The pharmacist at her local Rite Aid pharmacy in Visalia, California, had berated her for her history of opioid prescriptions, then told her to come back later. She left without the refill, feeling that she was being treated like a criminal.

Like millions of other chronic pain patients around the country, Doyle is the collateral damage of the opioid abuse epidemic. About 17,000 people die each year in the US from a prescription opioid overdose. Fifty million Americans suffer from chronic pain—one-fifth of the adult population—including 20 million who have what’s called high-impact chronic pain, or pain that frequently limits their daily life.

The campaign to keep opioids away from people who abuse them has ended up punishing the people who use them legitimately—even torturing them to the point of suicide. Now they are pushing back, mobilizing as best they can into a burgeoning movement. “Don’t Punish Pain” rallies are taking place in cities nationwide on May 22, and pain patients are organizing a protest at the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention in Atlanta on June 21.

Doyle posted her video to her Facebook page, The C Life, and by the time she got back to her office after her lunch break, her phone began to bing with notifications. The video has since been viewed about 330,000 times; many of the 1,400 comments came from people with similar experiences. After her post went viral, Rite Aid filled her prescription—and apologized.

“This is not right,” Doyle says. “These medications were created for the very problems we’re having, and yet we’re not being allowed access to them.”

Twenty years ago, easing pain was the mission and opioids were the method. Pain became known as “the fifth vital sign,” as important as blood pressure, temperature, heart rate, and respiratory rate, and hospitals and clinics routinely asked patients to rate their pain. In 1999 the Oregon Board of Medicine even declared that “clearly documented undertreatment of pain” was “a violation equal to overtreatment.”

At pain clinics, the best results came from offering a range of treatments, including physical therapy and cognitive behavioral therapy. But insurance was more likely to pay for the simpler pharmaceutical path. In 2017 doctors in the US wrote 199 million prescriptions for opioids, or 58.7 scripts for every 100 persons. That is actually a decline from the peak of 255 million opioid prescriptions, in 2012.

The drop in opioid prescriptions might be a sign that the crackdown on abusive use is working. It also might reflect the plight of chronic pain patients who suddenly find it hard to get the prescriptions they’ve been using to help them get through the day.