Solving the "opioid crisis"

[Broken_Erika]

1% of everyone on Earth has schizophrenia? 70 million people?

Who told you to say this? They told you to didn't they? It's a Conspiracy led by Elvis and Bigfoot in area 51!!!! You're all out to steal my Vital Essences!

 

[El_Machinae]

I wonder how long until it starts seeing serious and consistent weaponizing in terms of power posturing, rather than just the occasional use it gets right now.

Incarceration for mental health reasons has a long, long history of being weaponized.

With schizophrenia, society prefers 'out of sight, out of mind'. When someone disappears into the hospitals, we can sigh "oh, at least he's getting the help he needs", and then not think about it again.

 

[stinkubus]

The courts have placed strict limits on the circumstances by which one can be institutionalized. Most states are furiously trying to shutter their mental hospitals. These days the mentally ill are far more likely to find themselves in jail or prison than a hospital.

 

[hobbsyoyo]

Medications can be used and prescribed improperly. But the idea that they, or conditions like ADHD, are some giant scam is harmful and is something I take personally.

I don't think ADHD is a scam; I know people with it and their treatment is effective.

I also think that the notion that people are unnecessarily prescribed medications for it is overblown - especially compared to the opioid epidemic. It is nowhere near the same scale in the harm done or the prevalence. Really they don't even compare.

All I am trying to say is that it is a real thing that a very small minority of parents will attempt to have their precocious children diagnosed with ADD/ADHD in order to get them on medications with the hope that this will fix their 'behavior problems'. I've seen it first hand and have heard of it second hand. Again, not saying this is prevalent, just that it is a thing. Unfortunately these people prove the adage 'this is why we can't have nice things' and should be decried for the harm they do to people who really have these conditions.

 

[hobbsyoyo]

You only get overtime if you work more than 80 hours in 2 weeks hobbsyoyo, it doesn't matter if you worked 50 one week because I scheduled you for 30 the next week.
I'm just 'correcting' your time card.
Sorry I threw that pan and it hit you in the head. Take the rest of the day off, but I'm not paying you if you do go home.
You see this smudge on the pan you were supposed to clean? I'm docking your pay for it. It doesn't matter if it was left over from last night's shift, it's your responsibility.
Yeah sorry, this tip you got was actually the delivery fee and you have to give that to me.
Look, I know the cooks have said some nasty things but that's just the way they are. It's not sexual harassment if they don't touch you.
Oh so you talked about how much you are getting paid? You're fired.
I know you're the lead cook but I just hired these ex-felons with no experience for a dollar more than you because they're older.
It doesn't matter if he's drunk on the job if he does the job.
I know you hurt yourself in the kitchen and I have workmen's comp insurance for this but I'm not paying it. You're responsible for the hospital bill.
Does Stewie do any drugs? I need to know so I can have him tested to get his workmen's comp claim overturned.
Just because I told Steve to get out and never come back, I didn't fire him. He quit. So he doesn't get unemployment.

Most of those can be reported and the boss would get in major trouble. There are different departments and organizations for different violations but most of those are violations that can be punished.

Yeah, in Illinois one place I was at got in considerable hot water for less evil things.

You'd also lose your job.

Those were all real examples that either happened to me or my coworkers in Illinois (ironically) and North Carolina.

What Synsensa said is on point, most people didn't do anything about it because either they didn't know these acts were all illegal or they knew but couldn't afford to lose their jobs. The crap that restaurant owners get away with is literally unbelievable - to the point that posters here thought I was making it up.

Oh and I forgot the absolute cream of the crop -

>Employee needs a copy of their paystub faxed over by employer
>Employer faxes pay stub with a handwritten note on the bottom:
"How much of a raise do you want for <oral sex>

I told her to walk her butt over to the lawyers office across the street but she refused because she couldn't afford to lose her job even temporarily even with a guaranteed payout. Oh and she was 16 and he was a married 40-something.

 

[Synobun]

Put more blatantly: if getting fired from a workplace after reporting it wasn't a big deal, you wouldn't be working at that workplace to begin with.

You can't expect employees working in a dead-end, crap job to gleefully report their employers and take the fall financially if you're not going to personally shove them into the job cannon and fire them into Jobland. They work at this dead-end, crap job because they're limited in options (and hey, the unemployment rate is a thing, weird!) and can't just pack their bags and go elsewhere.

And hey, if you do get fired, that's great! You can just sue the employer for wrongful termination, right?

I mean, maybe. But if you're working a dead-end, crap job and now you're unemployed and looking for another dead-end, crap job, are you really going to have not only the time but the intelligence and legal know-how to handle a court case? The money to pay a lawyer to handle it for you? The time to show up to hearings and to look over the proceeding documents? Good luck.

At the bottom of the ladder, the system is designed to screw you. Reporting your employer might strike gold for others, maybe, but it will inevitably screw you over. And at the bottom of the ladder... well, getting screwed over just isn't so neat.

 

[rah]

Granted, but if you have rock solid evidence, like a paycheck stub with the above written comment that you can prove he wrote, there are many lawyers that will handle that for free up front for a piece of the settlement. But you're right that most people aren't knowledgeable or lack the desire to fight it. I somewhat disagree with the no other option because if the job is that dead end (from experience) there are usually other equally dead end jobs available. For professionals the chance of being blackballed must be considered.

 

[Synobun]

I don't know about rock solid evidence being good enough. There are definitely lawyers that work for free in exchange for a piece of the settlement, my family did that, but these can take an absurdly long time. All the while you're bleeding cash with tertiary expenses related to the case and the fact that you lost your job because of this.

My dad's termination/injury case ended after he died, and over 8 years after the case was originally filed.

That being said, the incentive to stick it through is probably greater in the US than it is here. Quick googling implies that you can get several hundred thousand dollars in the US after a wrongful termination case. My family's case ended up being around $17,000 with the lawyer taking $5,000 of it.

 

[inthesomeday]

Jeez guys it’s really starting to sound like the power employers have over employees is... inherently unethical and will inevitably be exploited or something. Who would’ve thought.

If only there was a solution

 

[hobbsyoyo]

Granted, but if you have rock solid evidence, like a paycheck stub with the above written comment that you can prove he wrote, there are many lawyers that will handle that for free up front for a piece of the settlement. But you're right that most people aren't knowledgeable or lack the desire to fight it. I somewhat disagree with the no other option because if the job is that dead end (from experience) there are usually other equally dead end jobs available. For professionals the chance of being blackballed must be considered.

The case with the fax was notable for the paper trail. Most of the rest would have been a he-said she-said thing in court, making the cases harder to fight.


Mini-cartels are a thing in crap jobs. The employer in North Carolina was part of a family that owned nearly all the restaurants in town. Taking one of them to court would have significantly hampered the ability to get a job in another of the restaurants.

 

[Bamspeedy]

I understood the original point of the post (from page 2 or 3?) wasn't that those things are illegal, it was whether 'small family business' are more likely than corporations to try to pull this kind of crap. Some of those things on the list I saw working at small employers, which I never seen happen working for a corporation.
It might be easier to sue a small business than a corporation (but the payout if the corporation loses is larger), but getting the manager fired or replaced can be harder in the small business if the manager is the owner, or a family member of the owner.

Yeah, the corporation has a better chance of the highest levels of management sitting in a boardroom somewhere joking amongst themselves about how hard they are making the workers work or how to spin 'benefit changes' to sound like an improvement when it's really a loss for the employees. But they don't sit around thinking of ways to obviously break the law, and if anything corporations are more about following it. I can't even get my gloves out of my work locker before clocking in because that's technically considered work.

 

[Traitorfish]

"Mental health disorders" as defined by people who make their living treating mental health disorders. Amazing that so many people have them. What's REALLY amazing is that the same humanity that now has one specimen in five "requiring" treatment managed not to fall into extinction before such treatments became available.

There's a pretty easy argument to make that modern society exacerbates just about every mental condition. Modern society society is intense and merciless and just always happening in a way which humans just aren't built for. Premodern society had the sort of space and time and depth to accommodate psychological divergence that a society which runs by the factory clock just is not prepared to allow.

Jeez guys it’s really starting to sound like the power employers have over employees is... inherently unethical and will inevitably be exploited or something. Who would’ve thought.

If only there was a solution

or like unions or whatever i dunno i'm not a lawyer.

 

[rah]

Mini-cartels are a thing in crap jobs. The employer in North Carolina was part of a family that owned nearly all the restaurants in town. Taking one of them to court would have significantly hampered the ability to get a job in another of the restaurants.

In that case probably so. In my early years I did some dishwashing, waiting and cooking and if a manager irritated me, I just quit and found another crappy restaurant. The manager aspect was the one thing I could control. In any decent sized city there are many options.

 

[Azem.Ocram]

Oh and I forgot the absolute cream of the crop -

>Employee needs a copy of their paystub faxed over by employer
>Employer faxes pay stub with a handwritten note on the bottom:
"How much of a raise do you want for <oral sex>

I told her to walk her butt over to the lawyers office across the street but she refused because she couldn't afford to lose her job even temporarily even with a guaranteed payout. Oh and she was 16 and he was a married 40-something.

That is just plain horrible! If she couldn’t afford to temporarily lose her job with a guaranteed payout much higher than her losses, I can only infer she has absolutely no savings, no way to pay for college, and no good future. At 16, she wouldn’t be so desperate to endure sexual harrassment at work if she had good parents. No savings and no good parents, working at age 16 in a bad environment == poor prospects for the future.

 

[Traitorfish]

That is just plain horrible! If she couldn’t afford to temporarily lose her job with a guaranteed payout much higher than her losses, I can only infer she has absolutely no savings, no way to pay for college, and no good future. At 16, she wouldn’t be so desperate to endure sexual harrassment at work if she had good parents. No savings and no good parents, working at age 16 in a bad environment == poor prospects for the future.

I'm not sure that weird Victorian moralising is the appropriate direction to go with this.

 

[inthesomeday]

Is that passage trying to assign blame to... her parents?

 

[Synobun]

If you don't have a diverse real estate portfolio by 16 and a car from daddy, what are you even doing with your life? Scrub.

 

[Azem.Ocram]

Is that passage trying to assign blame to... her parents?

The blame is on her boss but two good parents could step in and at least lend a hand to help her out while she is temporarily unemployed before she reaps the benefits of the lawsuit. I doubt her father is in her life and presume either her mother rents and cannot afford to support her or she is in effect an orphan. Food shouldn’t be a huge issue because of government programs like free school lunches, food stamps, and TANF but she or her parent might not have applied.

 

[inthesomeday]

Check out Sherlock Holmes over here. Have you met her or something?

 

[civvver]

While the companies pushing this trash are of course responsible, I resent even more the doctors that prescribe painkillers for people who have totally mild and normal symptoms. Nowadays people take painkillers to deal with muscle ache caused by a flu. WTH is wrong with people?

It's not availability that causes the problem. Growing up in Brazil I could get whatever medication I wanted without any prescription. Just walk into a pharmacy and ask for whatever, they would give it. But I never took a painkiller in my life (I did get anesthesia of course during medical procedures, but never bought that crap myself). The problem is people thinking that any discomfort should be numbed down by opioids.

It really all started with penicillin tbh. Ever since they started “prescribing” “antibiotics” to people with “diseases” like “cholera” our society became hooked on “medicine” from “doctors”.

Penicillin is one of the greatest discoveries in human history. There are so many common diseases that were life threatening that now we don't even think about because of antibiotics.

Still Luiz post actually made me think more of antibiotics being over prescribed and the emergence of super bugs. Screw nuclear holocaust and zombies, if we're going to all die it's going to be from some antibiotic immune super bug. It's the same thing with pain, you don't need opiods for most pains. After my vasectomy I took motrin. That's it. When I get a cold I don't go to the dr or get medicine. I rest, hydrate, ride it out. Yes it takes a week sometimes to fully quit it. But even with the super green stuff it'll go away eventually, just as long as you don't have strep.

I have never heard a doctor prescribe an antibiotic and say "yeah, this is a management program you'll be on for the rest of your life." Ask the next person you meet that is on a blood pressure medication what their doctor says about how they get off it. Ask the next person you meet that takes a "mood enhancer" what their doctor says about getting them off of it. Ask the next person you meet that uses pills to get to sleep when their doctor predicts their unmedicated future will start.

Well blood pressure medicine the issue is most people aren't willing or able to make the lifestyle changes to lower their pressure naturally. Though sometimes it's just a result of getting old and not much you can do. I have heard that anti depressants were never intended to be taken for a long period of time and now people trying to get off them are relapsing hard.

There are plenty of other management prescriptions though that seem reasonable. Like if you have gerd then ppis could be a life saver. Same with cholesterol as sometimes it's just genetic, you can be super healthy and have terrible cholesterol. Diabetes and insulin for type 1s (most type 2s can be controlled with diet and healthy lifestyle). Medicine in general is pretty wonderful, it's just people using in wrong. It's like the internet. Wonderful tool, yet people misuse it all the time.



As far as the opiod crisis, we need a class action law suit like there was against big tobacco. It's very close to the same thing, understating the addictiveness of the products and the health risks.