“I don’t have a doctor at all right now,” said Israel. “I need pain meds, but I don’t have any because there was a false positive last year that I proved was false, but the doctor said there was no such thing as a false positive. She dropped my pain meds overnight.”

Some patients have complained to PNN that the rallies are poorly organized and they don't know who to contact or where to get further information. Perhaps the best thing to do is to join their Facebook group by clicking here and see if the information has already been posted.

The Don’t Punish Pain rallies were organized in the last few months without support or funding from other patient advocacy groups. It truly is a grassroots effort, supported by volunteers like Rhonda Posey, a Texas grandmother who suffers from arachnoiditis, a chronic spinal condition.

“It’s been fun to be involved with it, but it’s been quite a job,” says Posey, who helped organize the Don’t Punish Pain rally at Dallas City Hall Saturday morning. She was unable to get a permit at the state capitol in Austin, possibly due to the stigma associated with opioids.

“We had to have legislator sponsorship (for a permit). And we reached out to probably a dozen people trying to get someone to sponsor us and nobody would do it,” she told PNN. “They probably didn’t want their name associated with something like that.

“Dallas has been very nice. Someone will be there with us the entire time. They’ve been real nice about everything, so it’s worked out well.”

Posey has also been successful in getting some advance media coverage of the rally from local newspapers and from KTRE-TV. Her group plans to bring 50 pairs of shoes to the rally to represent patients who have died from suicide or medical conditions caused by untreated pain.

She and Israel say it is time for different tactics by the pain community. Just signing petitions and writing letters to politicians about how the government’s response to the opioid crisis is hurting patients hasn't been effective.

“Nobody’s got the guts to standup and say wait a minute, there are other people suffering. It’s not just people that are suffering form addiction. It’s not just the families who are suffering from people who have died from overdoses," Posey said. “What about me? What about the millions of chronic pain patients that are suffering? What about us?”