Why Some Well-Meaning Laws Push People Toward Street Drugs

The sad thing is that the opioid epidemic was so often started by people who are prescribed drugs from their doctors. And so that's another thing. There's a sea change happening right now, is that there's all these new regulations about what doctors are allowed to prescribe. They're trying to discourage them from prescribing opioids. And that's a positive shift, I think, for people who are new patients, right? It's like if you get a root canal, you don't need some crazy strong opioid to recover from a dental procedure or whatever. But the problem is that now they're starting to take away people's opioids when they've been on them for a long term. I talked to this woman from Colorado, and she had a disease, I can't remember, rheumatoid arthritis or something. She'd been taking opioids for years and years and years. And now all of a sudden, the doctor was like, I can't give you these anymore. You have to take these classes about alternatives to opioids. And they talked about acupuncture and yoga and stuff like that. And all that's great. But she felt just degraded. And studies have shown that people, if they get their opioid pills taken away, they're going to turn to street heroin as a result. The whole thing is insanely complicated. Yeah, you talked about that, that there's three waves, right? The first wave is the pills, second wave is street heroin, and then third wave is fentanyl. Yeah, exactly. So we're still facing the repercussions from the first one. And that's what all these lawsuits that you hear about in the news are all about. Another scary thing is that up until now, people hadn't been asking for fentanyl by name. Like we said, it's just put in other drugs. But now in places like San Francisco, even St. Louis, fentanyl is starting to acquire a reputation as a street drug because long-time heroin addicts don't get high anymore. You know what I mean? They take heroin, and it just gets rid of their withdrawal symptoms. So fentanyl will get them high again, and so people are starting to seek it out.