KY has had serious problems with drugs in the past & they clamped down on many of the pain specialists, so they are very leery of prescribing the opiates now. So many of the patients were abusing the meds (like your husband's friend) that it's made it almost impossible for those of us in real pain to get the meds that we really need. I was already being prescribed the large dose of med when I lived in California. When I moved here, I couldn't find a pain specialist that would prescribe the medication I was on.....took me a lot of searching. I found one pain specialist that I was going to go with in Lexington, but ended up finding another one that was even better.....all from phone calls from California when I was back there for a few weeks as the pharmacy would no longer fill my California prescriptions. (DEA is really picky here in KY even more so than in California).

Turned out that the pain specialist that I go to had a problem & almost lost his license because of one of his patients, so he was very leery of taking me on.....had to go to a pain psychologist to determine that I didn't have addictive tendencies which was pretty obvious since I had been on the same dose for 5 years already before coming here, but all he had was the note from my California pain specialist to trust at the time.

It took about a year to develop a trust & a good rapport between us, but once we established that, we haven't had any problems. For awhile, the pharmaceutical company was having problems with back orders & not having enough supply of the med I needed & that made it difficult as it was impossible to go to more than one drug store to pick up all of my prescription & they couldn't fill part if the rest can't be filled within 72 hours.....ugh.....all the complications made my situation with my Dr a bit difficult as there were times when he had to write out the rest of the prescription because it couldn't all be filled & I seemed to be a problem patient even though it wasn't my fault.

When you end up on the opiate drugs, it can be a very complicated situation, but sometimes, it's the only thing that will relieve the pain & they become necessary in order to have any quality of life (which is one of the things that determines whether they will prescribe them or not (along with lack of addictive issues)

I really think that going to a good Pain specialist, one that is willing to prescribe the narcotics (you have to ask because they don't all prescribe them even though they are pain specialists).

I remember when my first California pain specialist refused to prescribe the amount of med that worked, so I was in the ER at least once a week for a demoral shot. They were claiming that I was drug seeking, & yet they found out that once I was prescribed the right amount of pain medication, I never needed to go to the ER even once for pain.....proof above everything else that I WAS NOT DRUG SEEKING!!!!

Hope you can find a good specialist soon as there is nothing worse than continuous pain to cause even more depression than we would normally have.

Praying that it will all work out for you