Mørphine shortage?

[lost in space]

Anybody heard of this? Pharmacist— I'm in eastern WA state—told me. Can't get a prescription filled. Are you affected? Seems like most of the hits I get are from Australia.

[Ombligo]

You are near Canada, just get some of the fentanyl flooding across the border /s

[Tiangou]

Opioid shortage:
https://www.statnews.com/2024/12/27/opio...-patients/

A recent survey of 2,800 people across the country living with chronic pain paints an even grimmer picture: 90% reported delays or difficulties in filling their opioid prescription, mainly because pharmacies didn’t have the medication in stock. The Food and Drug Administration and the American Society of Health Pharmacists are also reporting widespread shortages of essential opioids, including morphine and hydromorphone. The proposed 2025 reductions to opioid production quotas will only deepen this crisis...

[Diana]

Tiangou wrote:
Opioid shortage:
https://www.statnews.com/2024/12/27/opio...-patients/

A recent survey of 2,800 people across the country living with chronic pain paints an even grimmer picture: 90% reported delays or difficulties in filling their opioid prescription, mainly because pharmacies didn’t have the medication in stock. The Food and Drug Administration and the American Society of Health Pharmacists are also reporting widespread shortages of essential opioids, including morphine and hydromorphone. The proposed 2025 reductions to opioid production quotas will only deepen this crisis...

This is a result, either indirectly or not, of strategies put in place for several years to reduce the “opioid epidemic”: in 2023 (and earlier) my mom needed increasingly more pain meds for an undiagnosed condition. Late that year she was finally diagnosed with stage 4 colon cancer. She also needed relief from back pain; osteoporosis and several spinal bone fractures. Getting those drugs for her (she couldn’t drive and could barely move around; walking from the car to the pharmacy counter became too much) became more and more difficult. I had to try several pharmacies and coordinate amongst them and the doctor to ensure she had enough to cover the timeframe she was allowed. If you ran out? Too bad. Wait until you were allowed to get the prescription renewed. And when I said coordinate, I mean get x from here and y from there, and to get this done the doctor had to send the prescription to pharmacy A to get the x and pharmacy B for y, and make sure you do it quickly enough because there were no guarantees that the pharmacy could fill the prescription in the time it took to you to find out how many they could fill, get the prescription done and sent to them.

I do not know the true cause of the shortage then.

This shortage has been years in the making. Fewer sales means less production.

Mom even had a pill machine that would dispense the medication on a regular schedule to ensure that she wouldn’t be getting more than what was prescribed. She was not happy about it, but it kept her more on schedule than if she didn’t have it. The only thing better would have been a person there to ensure that she took all her meds but as there wasn’t someone there she couldn’t be reduced to demanding that she get more pain meds. Even do, I still heard about it.

Edit: It was OxyContin or hydrocodeine. Different pains require different medications, and as her exact condition was unknown getting it right was difficult. Some meds just didn’t work, she would say.

[prymsnap]

My brother, who's battling Stage Four cancer, relies on time-release morphine. It's not been available for about a month now.