Lawmakers could inflict pain

Letters to the Editor

Lawmakers could inflict pain

State lawmakers have set out this session to create well-meaning bills to curb Kentucky’s growing crisis with heroin and fentanyl abuse and overdose. The problem with most of them is that they discriminate and may harm those with chronic pain from injury, disease or cancer, which, under federal law, may qualify as a disability.

How and when providers can prescribe a controlled substance to treat pain is already extremely limited. The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention directions for prescribing opioids were meant as guidelines, mainly for use by primary-care practitioners. However, current proposals like House Bill 333 cite the CDC guidelines as justiﬁcation for putting a three-day limit after injury or for ongoing prescription.

Several other bills in the legislature also need to be stopped. If these bills become law, there will be more people like Doug Hale, of Vermont, who committed suicide in May 2016 because he was under-treated for his pain and then was completely weaned off. Patients with disabilities are just as important as those with substance abuse disorders.

It’s time for the public to demand better bills that help substance abusers but do not unintentionally harm those needing legal medication to do simple functions, such as shower and cook. We must ﬁnd a way to make this heroin and fentanyl overdose crisis better without causing casualties in the process.

Sara Raymond

United Kentucky Pain Care Action Network

Lexington

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Letters to the Editor

Schaeffer column on tribalism draws responses. Also, thoughts on respectful firefighters, McConnell, border wall

By Herald-Leader readers

February 22, 2019 11:51 AM

Expansive identity

Because of our experience as Peace Corps volunteers and staff living and working in Liberia, Sierra Leone and Fiji, and our experience since of knowing immigrants as good friends and family, we have a much broader idea of identity than what Cameron S. Schaeffer described in his recent Herald-Leader commentary (“Tribalism and media prejudice ruining America”, Feb. 16).

We know it’s possible for immigrant citizens to feel connected to and contribute to both the United States and their countries of origin. It is even possible for those who are American-born to be connected to and contribute to the United States and another country. We know an immigrant from Libya who has lived in Lexington for 35 years and says, “I value this country in a different way than people who were born here because I have seen both sides. There is nothing wrong with loving two countries.” Another says, “I am from South Sudan but I am also American. It’s both of me. I have to stand in the middle.”