I’ve joined the ranks of opioid pill-poppers... and I’m terrified I’ll get hooked

With thousands of Britons in the grip of a new addiction, LIBBY PURVES reveals how crippling pain has left her facing a fearful dilemma

OF ALL the sad stories of our time, one that strikes to the heart is the business of addiction to prescription drugs.

The ‘ opioid crisis’ has led to anger at the opportunism of multinational pharmaceutical firms, and countless articles warning of the drugs’ dangers.

Read, for instance, of a woman who, as a teenager, was given co-codamol for a knee injury, but now, as a mother, admits to a level of addiction that made her manoeuvre and cheat the system to get more. Learn about families disrupted by dependency, and busy professionals secretly relying on large daily doses.

even soap operas have shown how ordinary people can be led into addiction without having done anything illegal to start with. dr Ali in Coronation Street is the latest character to suffer and, before him, both Kylie Platt and Joe McIntyre.

Still, the pills do have their uses, at least in the short-term. And, like many who suffer from unbearable pain, I find myself being offered them, even while vowing I won’t take them for long.

After most of a lifetime taking nothing but the odd paracetemol, I have a new acquaintance with strong painkillers. For a decade or so, I’ve had chronic sciatica, violent nerve pain, down my right leg. It’s caused by a wonky vertebra, which I’ve seen on a scan.

I like to think, resentfully, that this is the result of a youth spent carrying a very heavy BBC radio tape recorder on my right shoulder, as a local and then Radio 4 Today reporter.

Thepain sometimes quietens down, but this summer it flared up into such extreme activity that — like the grim original of hans Christian Andersen’s The Little Mermaid — often every step I take stabs like a knife.

I’ve tried everything to cure it, advised by doctors and physios. I do exercises, ride a bike (wincing loudly with every press of the pedals), attempt cures with strange vibrating belts, and obediently lie on my stomach for 30 minutes a day, trying to develop a way to read without neck strain.

But add a damaged knee on the same side, and it has got to the point where five minutes’ hobbling down the road can leave me gasping tearfully and leaning on a wall or tree (the everpatient dog at my side), attempting stretches to little effect.

So, for a while, every time I saw a report about the opioid scandal, my first flippant response was to

say: ‘ Gimme some!’ however, when I was actually offered them, I flinched.

Still, after talking to my excellent GP, and given that everything else has failed, I decided to try them.

The doses are low: I started on an ordinary anti-inflammatory, then codeine-based ones when that brought no relief, and gabapentinoids — the latter two categories scoring high on the list that creates worry about long-term addiction.

If you accept a prescription, it’s stupid not to take it exactly as the doctor says for a few weeks’ experimental period. But, as far as pain relief goes, I have to say that, so far, they’re no miracle.

Maybe that’s just as well: I know, as does my doctor, that, far from demanding more at the next visit, I shall be clamouring to come off them and barracking for any other solution.

If it involves hanging upside down by my ankles, sleeping in a freezer cabinet or travelling to a faith-healing shaman in Nova Scotia, I’m in.

I think my anything-but-pills attitude is particularly strong thanks to the legacy of a Scottish Presbyterian father and a downtoearth mother — whose own mother was of the pill-popping type. These inherited attitudes mean I hate taking anything: six months on Prozac for a bad depression in the Nineties made me feel a positive pariah.

But there’s no point in being unreasonable, and certainly no point in criticising anyone who is permanently on medication for good reasons. Many modern drugs, including antidepressants, are almost miraculous, and there are conditions that mean some individuals really do have to take them for life.

however, it’s worth repeating that, even for the most commonly prescribed drugs, there are still questions to be asked.

either science doesn’t know exactly how they work (as in the case of SSRI ( selective serotonin reuptake inhibitor) antidepressants, or else medicine is relying on just-good- enough data from widespread trials.

Worst of all, in the case of pain pills, over time they don’t even keep working. All they do is make themselves painfully, urgently necessary to the user.

Some 12 million British citizens annually are prescribed painkillers, antidepressants or sleeping pills intended to be used for six months. It is thought half are still taking them after a year.

Public health england reports that prescription rates are 1.5 times higher for women than men and, shamefully, that poorer people, especially in deprived areas in the North, are given more and take them for longer. Scotland is even more afflicted.

I am no expert, but it is not hard to pin down two reasons for this over-prescription. First, in Britain, we don’t have enough GPs for them to be able to spend time analysing what is really wrong with a patient who has complex issues. especially if he or she is not good at explaining clearly. Ten-minute appointment slots — more like eight in a busy practice — are not long enough.

NhSeNGLANd says it is investing more in talking therapies, for depression, and ‘social prescribing’, such as exercise and art classes, to wean people off chemical remedies. Fine.

They could also offer more physiotherapy on the NhS: it’s hard to get outside acute hospital care, but quite a few chronic aches respond miraculously to it.

When I had a paralysed arm from a severed nerve for four months, the offer of free physio ended so quickly that I spent the last three months of treatment paying privately.

I was lucky I could afford to do so — without it, I doubt I’d have any use at all of my left hand.

And then there’s the second reason: demand. When we’re feeling bad, we are reassured by medicine. We laugh about our great- grannies demanding a tonic or a mixture for every ailment — ‘the one in the green bottle always does me good’ — but the hunger for a simple solution has always been deep-rooted in human beings.

ever since the first witch doctors handed out weird herbs, or medieval apothecaries pounded up bits of dried alligator, people have been pleased to be given something they’re told by those in charge will take the pain away. A pill for every ill!

Any doctor will tell you that the hardest thing of all is to send a sad or angry patient away without a prescription in their hand — an answer to their worries.

This is not about me; other people are far more afflicted than I have ever been.

But, watching from the extreme edge, I do feel for the crisis — and for the medical dilemma.

As I dispiritedly pop open the latest weird drug, wondering how much it had to do with last night’s nightmares and the morning’s nausea, I can’t help but think of all the lives wrecked by prescription drug addiction.