Whipped Cream Difficulties

Tony Sparano, offensive line coach for the Vikings and former head coach of the Dolphins and Raiders. StarTribune.

This is kind of a half-obit, but I want to bring it up here so I can call out a couple of things. Tess Henry was an opiate addict. Beth Macy, a writer for the NYT, covered her struggle to get off opiates using “medication-assisted treatment”. Sadly, that struggle ended last December: someone beat her head in and threw her in a dumpster.

This jumped out at me:

Tess’s mother, Patricia, wasn’t a believer in M.A.T because she thought it was widely abused. She worked as a hospital nurse and had seen patients admitted for infections after injecting themselves with buprenorphine and other opioids, as well as countless others, like Tess, who had relapsed after being on the program.

…

As a reporter, I’m not supposed to try to change the outcome of a story. But in Tess’s case, it seemed wrong to remain silent. When Tess was stuck in Las Vegas and couldn’t board a plane because she’d lost her ID, I urged Patricia to help her get on maintenance drugs so that she could make the three-day bus journey home without getting dope sick. Once, when Patricia texted me about taking care of a 25-year-old patient on Suboxone who had contracted endocarditis, an infection of one of his heart valves, from injecting it and other drugs, I gently replied that while Suboxone was sometimes abused, at least there wasn’t any fentanyl in it, “so it’s somewhat safer than street heroin.”

So, on the one hand, we have the addict’s mother, who not only knows her better than just about anyone else, but who is also a nurse who has treated addicts. On the other hand, we have…a NYT reporter.

This, too:

The day of her funeral in January, Dan Polster, a federal judge in Cleveland, was presiding over a hearing in the continuing mass litigation case against opioid makers, distributors and retailers. “About 150 Americans are going to die today, just today, while we’re meeting,” Judge Polster said.
Last month, a lawyer representing some of the plaintiffs in that case called me to discuss a potential settlement. She wanted my ideas about how to treat the more than two million opioid-addicted Americans.

Settlement for what? We’ve decided we’re going to demonize the drug companies for making effective painkillers available, and make it harder for people with real, chronic, crippling pain to get the drugs those companies make – drugs that can improve their quality of life – because we’re so damn concerned with what other people put into their bodies.

I’m not exactly “pro-heroin”. But if Tess Henry had been able to spend $20 a day on a couple of shots – shots of known dosage and purity – would she have been able to work? Hold down a job? Take care of her child? Would she have been any different than the person who comes home at night and drinks some Scotch over ice?

Would Tess Henry be alive today, if we weren’t so insistent on the “demon opiates” line of thinking?

Beth Macy is the author of the forthcoming “Dopesick: Dealers, Doctors, and the Drug Company That Addicted America,” from which this essay is adapted.

“the Drug Company That Addicted America”. I think we know where she’s coming from.