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. Author manuscript; available in PMC: 2017 Aug 23.
Published in final edited form as: Subst Abus. 2017 Apr 10;38(2):213–221. doi: 10.1080/08897077.2017.1296524

Table 5.

Patients’ perceptions of the risks of opioids.

Patient control of opioid use
[What is your PCP is concerned about?] “That you might overdose. Yeah, but I know how much to take.”
“I’m not going to take no four to five pills a day. If I have to take four or five pills a day then they need to figure out how to do something different with me. Because I’m not going to sit up there and commit suicide [unintentionally overdose.]”
Responding to clinicians’ concerns
“She said she couldn’t prescribe it [opioids] to me as long as I was unclean. She went on to tell me what effects it would have on me, that it wasn’t good to mix the two [illicit drugs and opioids], that I have to give her a clean urine sample over a period of time before she can give it back to me.”
“[Clinicians are] always afraid that it’s going to cause you to go back and use[illicit drugs]. That’s what bothers [my clinician] that it might make me go back and use. But I told her it doesn’t affect me that way, it just doesn’t. Thank God it doesn’t make me feel like I want to go use.”
Stigma related to opioid policies
“She did it [opioid monitoring] because … she’s risking her reputation or practice…She wanted to make sure I wasn’t drug seeking.”
“People with jobs, when you can afford it, they don’t put you through that [monitoring]. You don’t sign all these contracts and, ‘Oh, if you go and do drugs then I’m not going to give it to you.’ No, you don’t go through that.
But you get a county hospital all of a sudden, ‘You need to sign a contract or we’re not going to give you this [opioid].’”
Risk of addiction to opioids
“I have never been the type of person that likes pain medication, because I didn’t want to get hooked on it. I’m not hooked on it now, but that has always been one of my fears.”
“I don’t want to be addicted to long-term medicine because I don’t like taking pills. If I don’t have to take them, I don’t want to take them. Right now [my PCP is] helping me out, we’re trying to get a drug that won’t let me get addicted. Norcos, you can get addicted to them and you can get a tolerance toward them, but with the methadone, from what I researched and we both researched, it helps you … you don’t get addicted to it.”