SOME DRUGS ARE VITAL TO DAILY LIFE

While useful information was provided in your articles on prescription pain
medications, you are naming specific medications which, when taken as
directed, are safe. What you are doing is deciding what should or should
not be prescribed to everyone.

I am disabled with severe back diseases as well as cancer. I have severe
allergic reactions to most medications. I can't keep changing medications
every time your reporters print a story.

I agree something needs to be done, but you have every doctor and now even
pharmacies trying new medicines that have worse side effects for severe
chronic pain management patients than the ones being used now when taken
correctly. You also talk about cost of these medicines, but what can a
permanently disabled person do? Be forced to take cheaper medications that
cause stomach bleeding, liver, kidney and heart trouble?

You cannot discriminate against a few beneficial medications because
certain people abuse them. Even Tylenol or aspirin will kill someone in
extreme pain if they take large enough doses or take illegal drugs to try
to stop severe chronic pain.

In this day and age, with the medical knowledge possessed by doctors, a
chronic pain patient should not have to live a miserable existence. You are
going to make the truly needy people suffer needlessly by making it
impossible to get the proper medicines on a timely basis.

You may very well cause some people -- maybe quite a few -- to end their
own lives due to the agony they must endure due to not getting the proper
medications needed for their situation. You wrote a great article, but
please print that many people take these medicines just to make life
bearable and be able to move about and not be bedridden.

Joe DeSimone, fort lauderdale