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tv   Washington Journal Viewer Calls  CSPAN  July 16, 2017 9:35am-10:02am EDT

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scholarship for, and when you finish that time in federal service and work in the private sector, the private sector will loan that you back to the government for the proverbial one weekend a month or let's say 10 days a quarter, where this will improve the cross polarization of ideas between the public and private sector. watch the communicators tonight at 8:00 p.m. eastern on c-span two. announcer: washington journal continues. on this sunday morning, we end our show back where we began, asking how the opioid crisis is affecting your community. , ife numbers this morning you have been affected by opioid addiction, 202-748-8000. if you are a medical professional, 202-748-8001. all others, 202-748-8002.
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it is a sunday morning across america here. some of the newspapers across the country about opioid addiction. record, thedaily opioid crisis, worst city in the united states for opioid abuse, wilmington. hickory, north carolina, where that story is from. revive or let, to die is the headline, youngstown, ohio, using naloxone to save lives creates a new debate. another headline from the front page of the sunday chieftain in pueblo, colorado. fewer pain meds, new state policy appears to target chronic pain sufferers. that is the front page this morning of the harold meter in lexington, kentucky, opioid dependent newborns forced the
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united kingdom and other hospitals to rethink care, the mom first approach. headlinesa few of the about the opioid crisis on a sunday in america this morning. we want to hear from you about what is happening in your community. south from new jersey. good morning. sal from new jersey. good morning. oxycodonehave been on due to a series of operations. i take 60 milligrams of oxycodone a day. even though i am "medically" addicted, there has never been a bone in my body that i would think about ever switching or going towards any other drug or seeking them on the outside. painfore, due to my great physician and my own
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knowledge of what this can do to me, it is of the utmost importance that the physician closely monitors patients with the drug testing at every visit to make sure the opioids are in their urine and they are not selling them on the outside, and also the problem, if you take all of your medication if you are prescribed that at once, that is your problem. you should not be doing that, and the government oversight is becoming intolerant of patients who really need these products. does your doctor talk to you about the addictive aspects of the drugs that you are taking? caller: yes, and i am also a retired health care assistant,
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so my knowledge is more than the normal person. he talks to me every visit about that come every 28 days. a matter of personal responsibility and knowledge of what you are doing and sort of trust but verify on the part of doctors making these prescriptions? caller: yes, that's absolutely true. it is a matter that the doctor themselves should regulate. your own personal doctor, not someone on a state board that regulates it. proposedchristie has legislation for the state that is intolerable. your first prescription can only be for five days. your second prescription can only be for five days. your third prescription is only good for 25 days.
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now, my pain management physician requires me to have andings with a psychologist a psychiatrist on a regular basis, so my pain management physician is a very, very responsible physician. host: thank you for telling your story. from new jersey, let's hear what john has to say about it, a medical professional in maryland. go ahead. caller: good morning. thank you for c-span. saying is very heartening, the opioids we do have are tremendous and helping pain management for people who need that. if anyonem is that listening things that there is not an opioid epidemic and abuse in your community, i am one that
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upper classdle to communities, and i am here to take that you definitely have a problem. this is something plaguing the whole country. this is not a socioeconomic thing. you would think it would be plaguing people in lower class communities that are financially strapped. this is a problem that is straight across the board. why athat is a reason dozen governors got together at this year's summer national governors association meeting to talk about this issue in their states, what they are doing to combat the opioid crisis. here is charlie baker on d stigmatizing the opioid attack epidemic. >> there is a peer support group for parents who are dealing with this issue with their kids. whoas started by a woman
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lost one of her children to an overdose and she had no place to go and nobody to talk to, so she created this group, and we now have them all over massachusetts. i have been to one of their gatherings, and they are raw, informative, but i was at one of them one night, this guy said, ,ou know, i lived in this town but the first time i went to one of these meetings, i went to one 30 miles away because i was afraid i might run into somebody that i knew here from our town. he said i went to the 130 miles away and ran into two people from our town who went to that went too. one of the other guys said come the same thing happen to me. he went to a different one. this was going to a meeting where you knew everybody there was somebody dealing with this. inre is a great, sad moment
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an hbo documentary they did on this issue on cape cod in massachusetts where they have a mom who is talking about her own child's addiction and she says, my kid had cancer. every day one of my neighbors would be over here with a casserole looking to help. she said, because my kid is dealing with an opioid addiction which has a mortality rate that is higher than some forms of cancer, my neighbors can't talk to me and i can't talk to my neighbors. i think the more we do collectively to make people realize they are not alone on stuff, help them get treatment, acknowledged a problem, and access resources come the better we will all be. host: you can view the panel discussion anytime at c-span.org.
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james, how have you been impacted? caller: my community is probably the largest community in america that are addicted to opioids. i had congestive heart failure, and i was treated for one of the symptoms, which is looted in the lungs and this chronic cough that is just terrible. i received cough medicine with an opioid in it that alleviated the cough, the headaches attributed to the cough, plus it allowed me to sleep. hospital, out of the the doctors are so paranoid about prescribing opioids to people who need them that i was not allowed to have an opioid. hospitalgo back to the to the emergency room and begged them to treat me, and they finally treated me with a cough medicine that did not contain an opioid, but the fact this opioid epidemic that 40 years ago in
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the 1970's was considered to be a crisis different than a community crisis. it was an individual crisis, and the people who were addicted were criminals and treated as such. have taken thes opposite point of view and people who need it can't get them because they are so paranoid that the v a will take their license away. today inhe doctors order to prescribed an opioid or any narcotic needs to go through some kind of extra continuing education that teaches them how to prescribed them. you don't have to prescribed them a year at a time. prescribed seven days. that is all i needed of a cough medicine, and i cannot get it. host: beth is in mitchell, indiana, go ahead. caller: i think that man made a really good point about physicians being trained on how to prescribe opioids.
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, first of all, there is a good book called dreamland that talks about the how thepidemic and purdue marketed to the ohio river valley. close to a hotspot for turneds epidemic that into opioid addiction that turned into heroin addiction. at how we have to look we prescribed medicine in the united states. very time a patient has an ache or pain, we expect a drug to fix it. there are other ways to deal with issues you have medically pills. heel our country uses more prescriptions than any
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country in the world. ways about marketing, the it has been put into our brains, and about the pharmaceutical companies ruling the world basically. point, ed markey of massachusetts, a democrat, put this out on friday, preventing opioid addiction begins with the prescribers, a link to this story about his legislation on this topic and effort to cut down on the number of americans addicted to prescription painkillers. senator markey would offered a bill on safe prescribing practices. senator warren and richard blumenthal cosigned onto a bill that would require professionals applying for federal licenses to learn about dust practices for pain management, alternative their peace, and methods for
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diagnosing and treating substance abuse disorder. so that legislation in the hopper. we will see what happens to it on the floor of the senate. oxnard, calm california, medical professional, go ahead. >> a few caller: a few comments. i have some patience with pain. i have some training in pain management. california once upon a time had a permit that you had to take a two day pain and end-of-life issues course, because pain was so badly managed in an opposite .ay, not enough pain medication people's pain was not being managed.
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i was glad to hear the comment just before there's going to be issuance of an educational outline about prescribing. so number 1 -- host: that legislation has not been passed yet, just introduced by those senators, but go ahead. i -- sorry, i just woke up. yes, there are principles that you use when someone has to be on long-term pain control. contingency is time , use other modalities along , any number of things. , this spike in
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overdoses, also it coincides with the onslaught of designer , and alsoarious sorts something you get off a drugstore shelf. in 2016, somewhere between 59,000 and 65,000 people died from drug overdoses in the united states. this chart from a recent wall ,treet journal piece on this showing the drug overdose deaths in the united states from 1980 through 2016. that number last year is more than the peak car crash deaths
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72.19 jim is in revere, massachusetts, good morning. caller: good morning. i have had a knee and hip had aement, and i also bad cough which would not go away. each time i was prescribed an opioid, which did the trick. niece toily, i lost a opioid overdose, and i have a nephew who struggles with it, there is a profound medical value to it. it just has to be governed aboutly, and it is more being aware of what it can do you and switch to
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over-the-counter painkillers as soon as you can when you have an issue. david has been affected by opioid addiction. what you think about those comments? without.ell, i agree -- with that. areoncern is pharmacies jumping in and playing doctor. i just got a phone call on friday saying they will not fill -- refill my opioid prescription and less i have imaging of my back. testicular through lymphoma, three back surgeries, , i mean, i need these opioids and they are now cutting me off . who is going to treat me for withdrawal? host: david, on the topic of treatments, the senate health care bill, the one postponed for
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new onehis week, the released on thursday would provide $45 billion for opioid addiction treatment, up from the $2 billion that was in the initial senate proposal. the senate bill also looking to cut some $800 billion from isicaid, a quarter of which used to fund opioid-related care for americans across the country. the reason that senate bill has been postponed, announced last night by mitch mcconnell that they would wait for john mccain to recover from ice surgery. -- i surgery. john mccain underwent surgery to remove a blood clot from above his left eye, so waiting for john mccain to get back next week before consideration of the health care bill. i have time for a few more calls
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on how the opioid crisis is affecting your community. joan, go ahead. caller: good morning. the reason i am calling is because in 2006 i unfortunately suffered a thunderclap migraine headache, and i have been to every single treatment that was possible to relieve my headache. i am talking from botox that i had an allergic reaction to to , medication i cannot take because my skin peels from these things. , have gone to every university and i think it is totally ridiculous that people who really need them -- now, i take two milligrams of morphine in the morning and two milligrams of morphine in the afternoon, and this enables me to be a
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person and to live a normal life. i do not abuse my medication. early,t refill it too and my doctor knows this, but my doctor would not prescribe them to me no more because she was afraid, and i think this is .eally sickening in this society today, for people who are really in great need, due to the fact that there are people who are abusing these things, they are taking away my quality of life, and i have to go to find another doctor and sign a form, which i really don't care, and i have to be drug tested with urine, which i don't really care because i do not abuse my medications. where iotten to a point living off of
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over-the-counter extra strength excedrin migraine headache pills. i was taking eight of them every four hours to alleviate my pain to bring it down to a three. i don't know if anyone is aware what a thunderclap migraine headache is like a mother they are constant and don't go away. host: thank you for sharing your surgery. ham and new jersey has been affected by opioid addiction. go ahead. caller: hello? host: go ahead. caller: good morning. thank you for taking my call. taking pain medication for over 10 years now. i have been to everything, multiple surgeries, injections, physical therapy, acupuncture, everything, i have tried it. when i was on the right doses that worked for me, i had a quality of life here it because
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of the government interference and the dea scaring off doctors. they are in fear. patients are being abandoned nationwide by their doctors. there are no options. it is wrong what they are doing. it is a witch hunt. investigateuld just this, inhumane guidelines, calling for further restrictions , it is wrong with their doing for chronic pain patients, and we are the ones greatly affected. day, -- theyht should be angry at addicts who choose to abuse. are theneed help too, ones being targeted by this
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witchhunt are legitimate pain patients. host: i got sure point, pam. sue in maine, go ahead. caller: i have been living in a rural area of maine that has traditionally been a poor county epidemic begand at least a decade before the rest of the state got hit. a child protective worker at the time, and most of my caseload involved people who were abusing or addicted, mostly to prescription drugs. that is the way it started up here. as the government began to crack down and there was more stopping them coming in cross border from canada and so forth, it switched over as everyone predicted to hear when. now we -- heroin.
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now we have kids in high school playing around with heroin. what i wanted to say is that during the time i was a caseworker, working with parents, and we were trying to provide whatever help we could to help parents get clean so that they could take care of their children, we had a terrible problem with resources. there were waiting lists for the counselors, for psychiatrists, because a lot of people have co-occurring mental health problems, and we had problems even getting patients in for treatment because doctors are limited in how many they can have. we did not have enough inpatient or outpatient programs , so we were saying you have to get help, but you have to wait 2-3 months.
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before you can get into see somebody, and so i am very concerned about the new health care bill that would be cutting medicaid funds, because most of the people with drug problems are low income, at least from my they did notnd if start out that way, once they are addicted, they will be low income. host: thank you for the call. the senate vote on that health care bill now rescheduled, delayed at least a week until john mccain recovers from his eye surgery. that will do it for our program today on "washington journal," , we will discuss the week ahead in washington, to reporters who cover the white house here in washington, d.c. we will be joined by brandon talk about the labor
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union that represents u.s. border patrol agents and discussed the trump administration's approach to border security. that begins tomorrow at 7:00 a.m. eastern. in the meantime, have a great sunday. ♪ [captioning performed by the national captioning institute, which is responsible for its caption content and accuracy. visit ncicap.org] [captions copyright national cable satellite corp. 2016] 2017] announcer: on c-span, newsmakers is next with eliot engel of new york. that is followed by the confirmation hearing for the nominee for fbi director. later, a look at president trump's recent visit to france for a steel day. -- by steel

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