Call Kurtis Investigates: Patients say pain pill crackdown left them with "excruciating withdrawals." How are they months later?
SACRAMENTO - An Orangevale veteran says he's managed to have a life using the same dose of pain meds for decades. But suddenly, he lost access to the full amount. CBS13 followed his journey for months, and here are the results.
Even something as simple as going for a walk with his wife is painful for Richard Wright.
"I'm on opiates for pain control," he told CBS13, explaining that 35 years after breaking his back, he's on doctor-prescribed morphine every day. "It gives me [the] quality of life and pain relief that allows me to get out of bed, get up and visit with my family -- especially my grandkids."
But a few months ago, Richard said his Kaiser doctor told him he was tapering the dose in half.
"I don't understand why they want to take it away," he said. "Without it, I'm in bed. With it, I have a life."
It turns out that since 2016, the CDC has recommended patients stay below the equivalent of 50 milligrams of morphine a day. Richard was taking 90 milligrams. His wife, Linda, says that gradually lowering his dose has left him in pain and sick from withdrawals.
"With medication," it's not like he has a perfect life and we accept that and we work with that," Linda told CBS13. "We've been doing this for 35 years."
Kaiser Permanente could not talk with us about Richard's case but admits it's changing some patients' opioid prescriptions "following current scientific evidence and public health recommendation," adding that the federal government has "new controls" in place.
States and the feds are aggressively going after the pharmaceutical industry for its role in the opioid crisis, and as part of some settlements, the distributors are restricting the painkillers they dispense. That, in turn, is forcing some doctors to rethink the medicine they prescribe, and pharmacists are scrutinizing the prescriptions they fill.
"The hardship is unbelievable," Janell Baptiste told CBS13 last year when the Sonora SaveMart pharmacy stopped filling the pain prescription. She said she's taken the pills for the last 13 years following a motorcycle accident. She ended up sick from withdrawals and couldn't find a pharmacy in her area willing to pick up her prescription.
"It's only been four months, but these four months have seemed like years," she said.
Her region, Tuolumne and Calaveras counties, have the highest rates of opioid prescriptions in all of California -- roughly 80 prescriptions for every 100 people -- that's more than double the state average.
"Unfortunately, over the last few years, we've had a large increase in opioid deaths," said Tuolumne County Health Officer Dr. Kim Freeman. "This is our highest year yet."
Dr. Freeman says that new data shows 14 opioid-related overdose deaths in 2022, a sharp rise since 2018 when there was only one.
"If you have a lot of patients on high doses, you're going to be under a lot of scrutiny and you've got to be careful as a provider," she told CBS13.
This can, in some cases, lead to larger efforts to taper patients to lower doses, which addiction researcher and professor Dr. Stephan Kertesz of the University of Alabama says, can have mixed results.
"The problem is that you cannot always resolve a crisis by going precisely backward from how you got into it," Dr. Kertesz said. "Even though some patients might benefit, many others suffer from mental health crises, overdose, suicidal ideas or actually dying by suicide.
UC Davis research published just last year showed that one to two years after an opioid dose was tapered by 15 percent or more, there was a 57 percent increased risk for overdoses and a 52 percent increased risk for mental health crises. CBS13 checked in with Janelle 10 months after she first struggled to get her medicine from Save Mart. She says she's now taking "small amounts" of opioids and would prefer a higher dose but is managing. She says another local pharmacy is now filling her prescription.
As for Richard, he says that while he understands there's an opioid crisis, he thinks he should have been part of the conversation even before his doctor cut his dose.
"I've never had an overdose; I don't plan on having an overdose," Richard said. "And that's a calculated risk I'm willing to take for the comfort it gives me."
CBS13 spoke with Richard last year and held on to his story as he navigated the taper. His initial updates describe excruciating pain and withdrawal symptoms. But now he's gone through Kaiser's pain management program, which tried some other therapies. And guess what? Last month, Richard says he swallowed his last morphine pill. Yes, after 27 years, he's not just on a lower dose, he's off morphine all together and taking a drug called Suboxone, also known as Buprenorphine. He says his pain is now manageable, and calls it "a miracle."