I just returned from the home of a long time friend who is,like myself,a victim of the current drug war ideology that permeates BC’s health care elites.Unlik myself,she isn’t someone with a history of opiate abuse.To the contrary,she is simply an unwitting victim of our health care systems ingrained opposition to the use of opiate drugs for the management of chronic pain.Unfortunately,I have a long history of heroin use and trafficking,going back to the 60’s.I actually started using with my wifes methadone,which she left in the fridge when she’d take off for days,weeks or a month.It was just to pass the time,as I was with our daughter,who was a pleasure,always.As a child,she also slept quite a lot.I digress,what I wanted to say was that this friend was in tears,once again,because her doctor was once again threatening to take her off of her morphine.Not because she was in less pain.To the contrary,she is much worse.He just thought she had been on it too long.This usually means that the college,in their ignorance and total lack of wisdom,doesn’t like long term morphine maintenance of any kind.She is getting a fifth of what I was getting per day when I was on morphine but it’s still too much.She needs hip and two knee replacements.Her pain is debilitating,but her doseage is very reasonable and s he has refrained from asking for more out of fear.Her pain isn’t being well controlled but she dare not ask for more,lest she be cut off altogether?She asked me,with tears in her eyes,why the BC medical people were so evil.Why they treated pain patients like criminals and made them justify every prescription on every visit and were constantly warning of withdrawal?This is a woman who is in constant chronic pain and is in need of surgery,for which she has no date.I told her I had been asking that same question for four decades and have never been given any kind of valid medical reason.There is no valid medical reason.These are the last of the prohibitionist true believers.They have it somewhere in their tiny brains that they are preventing the downfall of society.What they are doing is preventing the proper treatment of chronic pain in this Province.How to explain this in a Province with the only heroin maintenance program in NA?120 people won the lottery.They admit this themselves.The rest of us who have decades of ruined lives due to prohibition are the unlucky losers.Those of us who are unlucky enough to have a chronic pain issue are the worse off of all.They took away the one drug that was at least some kind of a mediator.They replaced it with another which they use high sounding and oh so moral reasons for changing to.This drug is nowhere near as effective as methadone and is causing problems in the majority of users.For those who have never been heroin users and are also in chronic pain,they get treated no better.In fact it’s because of the treatment she has seen through me,by the methadose clinic that she would never consider going to a methadose clinic.