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We have endlessly heard about the dire effects of people who abuse opioids. While their families have my sympathies, what we never seem to hear about are the devastating effects of declaring an opioid epidemic and limiting the levels of medication required by those with severe chronic pain who do not abuse those same opioids but have no other treatment options.

My father is in his mid-80s and has been taking prescription opioid medication for a couple of decades. He has multiple illnesses and injuries that cannot be successfully treated with NSAIDs or other medications. Hydromorph Contin is the only drug that allows him to function with a decent quality of life. He has a ruptured Achilles tendon that will never heal and he is too elderly and in too precarious health for surgery. He has fibromyalgia, a neck fusion from degenerative disc disease, osteoarthritis — and the list goes on.

Despite all of these health problems, his 36 mg daily of narcotic medication has still been reduced to only 24 mg total per day because the family doctor prescribes what he is told by new Health Canada Opioid guidelines — and no more, despite the decline in my father’s health from the pain.

There is no one to check on the effects of this arbitrary drug reduction. There is no accessible appeal system, no evaluation by another doctor — just “this is what I can get away with giving you, and you will have to live with the pain because I have nothing to substitute for the narcotic that will work.”

I have watched my father’s health deteriorate, and it is completely avoidable. He finds the pain enough of a deterrent that he will not walk a couple of hundred feet to a community mailbox; he’ll take a car. He finds it hard to get back to sleep in the morning once he wakes up. Until his medication dosage was cut back to two-thirds of the original, he’d mop the floor on cleaning day and do so about three times faster than me. Now he pretty much doesn’t do it at all. He is also a diabetic, and the increased pain may be hiking his blood sugar much more than if his pain were under control.

Health Canada needs to recognize that while anyone taking an addictive substance for a long period is by definition addicted to it, that isn’t the same as abusing it. I’m addicted to air, but that doesn’t mean I don’t need it to get by, and many prescription narcotic users have found themselves in the same situation when it comes to long-term opioid use for long-term or permanent pain. My father needs to be returned to his previous medication level, and it is long past time for all the others in the same situation to speak up and demand the same.

Protecting people who abuse legal medications by limiting the dosage of people who absolutely require such a dosage, and that they have proven they can handle, is harming those who do not abuse opioids.

Somebody needs to start speaking up, and someone definitely needs to start listening so they can realize there is a serious problem that two Aspirin or an Advil will not fix.

Martin G. Lewis, Beaver Bank