Hi from /r/ChronicPain! 
 
 I've been releasing music/poetry centered around chronic pain, mental illness, drugs, and suicide for a year now. 
 
 I advocate for the humane treatment of chronic pain patients. I advocate for the responsible use of opioids in those who need them. And finally, I advocate for controversial treatment avenues such as kratom, medical marijuana/CBD, ketamine infusions, and psychedelics. 
 
 You can read the transcript here if you don't want to hear my whiney voice 
 
 I am a lot less proud of the rest of my SoundCloud in comparison, but I've put out roughly 3 hours of music about this type of thing over the last year. 
 
 Andrew Kolodny (who has a background in addiction medicine) is heading an organization called PROP, or the Physicians for Responsible Opioid Prescription. This organization seeks to effectively funnel legitimate chronic pain patients into the addiction medicine umbrella. He stands to gain millions if his organization successfully treats all pain patients as addicts and forces them into addiction medicine clinics. 
 
 Andrew Kolodny and Physicians for Responsible Opioid Prescribing - PROP (mostly addiction specialists with little experience treating pain with opioids) petitioned the FDA in 2012 to change opioid manufacturing guidelines for patients with non-cancer pain, asking FDA to limit dosing to 100 MED and limit treatment to 90 days. FDA denied this request in 2013 due to a lack of scientific evidence to support limiting usage or dosage and no evidence to suggest cancer pain is different from non-cancer pain. 
 
 FDA Refuses PROP’s Request To Limit Opioid Dosage and Usage. 
 
 CDC published the 2016 opioid death report which falsely claimed pain patients were addicted and dying in massive numbers even though historically pain patients are rarely addicted or involved in opioid-related deaths. 
 
 This is made more complex due to the rise of fentanyl analog drugs coming from china which have been pressed into fake Xanax, OxyContin, and similar street pills, as well as the all too well known heroin fentanyl epidemic which has been making headlines for years. 
 
 CDC contracted with members from the anti-drug lobbying group PROP to help draft CDC guidelines for opioid prescriptions written by primary care physicians, even though CDC and PROP knew that illicitly manufactured fentanyl and heroin was the cause of the crisis. 
 
 Sources (admittedly biased towards chronic pain patients): 
 
 https://www.painnewsnetwork.org/stories/2015/9/21/prop-helped-draft-cdc-opioid-guidelines. 
 
 http://nationalpainreport.com/cdc-opioid-prescribing-guideline-unintentional-consequences-8836710.html. 
 
 CDC Guidelines were implemented by the states as rule rather than guidelines as originally intended, forcing pain patients off their medication or to a lower, non-therapeutic dosage. This was done in spite of CDC having no prescription regulatory power and FDA already telling PROP there is no scientific evidence to suggest these limitations are necessary or useful. 
 
 In 2018, CDC finally issued a correction for the 2016 opioid death report admitting that the majority of the deaths were from illicit fentanyl and heroin, not legal prescription pain pills. CDC and National Institute on Drug Abuse (NIDA) concede pain patients are almost never involved in opioid-related deaths. According to SAMHSA 2016 and similar studies the addiction rate for pain patients is less than 1%. 
 
 Source: https://ajph.aphapublications.org/doi/10.2105/AJPH.2017.304265 
 
 Additional source (again, biased towards pain patients): https://www.clinicalpainadvisor.com/opioid-addiction/the-issues-with-the-cdc-guidelines-on-opioids-for-chronic-pain/article/524976/. 
 
 Thomas Kline has been extremely interactive on Twitter, taking polls and hearing our side of the story. This is a stark contrast to how @SupportPROP and Andrew Kolodny have operated their social media accounts. I could pull a ton of examples, but I think it's best for you all to draw your own conclusions. 
 
 I don't make any money on my music, but I want this issue to be more well known. 
 
 On Twitter people use the hashtags "SuicideDueToPain" and "OpioidHysteria". 
 
 The 3rd Don't Punish Pain Rallies are taking place on the 29th of this month. This might be a good way to grab some attention. The Rallies are national and the Facebook groups are gaining traction. Still, until people see this issue it's not going to change. 
 
 It probably won't change anyway. 
 
 Opioids, pain medications in general, and the politics surrounding pain are some of the most faceted issues I've ever researched. The factors leading up to the current climate surrounding pain and opioids specifically are so unbelievably complex I can't even fit it in a single Reddit post. I'm going to piss some people off, it's inevitable, especially when talking about an issue as complex as opioids in America. This is an issue deeply rooted in racism, politics, money, and large corporations such as Purdue Pharmaceuticals. 
 
 I'm sure many are going to draw a lot of your own conclusions. Some of you may call my mental health, medical history, and work ethic into question, or even outright accuse me of being a drug addict. This is pretty much par for the course since I've started speaking out about these issues. I personally don't care what you think of me as an individual, as long as you all are forced to see this issue for what it is. We are being punished for the actions of others. Addiction is a medical condition, but chronic pain patients should not be treated as addicts by default. 
 
 So Reddit, AMA! 
 
 -Adam 
 
 Verification <- (mods please tell me I can remove that awful picture.) 
 
 Additional sources and timeline provided by Tamera Stewart aka /u/OklaInPain ||||| After Reddit effectively consumed itself this weekend over the firing of beloved AMA coordinator Victoria Taylor, redditors have been clawing at themselves for a chance to hear Taylor’s side of things. And now, at long last, the ex-employee has made her first public statement since the real chaos began. 
 
 Posting on the subreddit /r/self, Taylor wrote: 
 
 All of which is very nice and heartwarming and inspiring, what have you, but more importantly, it doesn’t really tell us much of anything at all. 
 
 The prevailing theory of why she got fired seems to be some combination of her refusing to move to the West Coast and a reluctance to experiment with new formats for the site’s AMAs, the latter of which was pointed out in a now-deleted post on Quora from Marc Bodnick, the site’s Business and Community Leader: 
 
 Hopefully some more concrete information about what happened will make its way to the surface soon. But in the meantime, hey, at least you know someone out there believes in you. ||||| According to company numbers, IAmA hosts more than 8.5 million subscribers and between 20 and 30 million page views per month on its own. We started using Reddit as students, one of us around 2007 and the other around 2010, and now we are both attorneys. Reddit is not our job, but we have spent thousands of hours as a team answering questions, facilitating A.M.A.s, writing policy and helping people ask questions of their heroes. We moderate from the train or bus, on breaks from work and in between classes. We check on the subreddit while standing in line at the grocery store or waiting at the D.M.V. 
 
 Advertisement Continue reading the main story 
 
 We donate our time and talents to Reddit, a for-profit company, because we truly like building cool things on the Internet for others to enjoy. And because Reddit provides a democratic forum based on voting to determine what content gets seen, this means that the most interesting content will rise to the top. Comments and posts that users enjoy get up-voted and become more visible. Comments and posts that users are less interested get down-voted and become less visible. 
 
 The democratic system has worked very well. The communities we once moderated with a handful of subscribers grew to millions, and the demands of those communities expanded proportionally. We needed someone like Victoria Taylor to help meet the challenges that arose when running a site read by millions. Communities built their policies around her and relied on her as a coach, a warm voice and a point of contact in an emergency. When the company removed her without warning or providing alternative resources, it effectively hindered every community that hosts the wildly popular A.M.A.s that have made Reddit a part of the mainstream media conversation. 
 
 Photo 
 
 We received news of Ms. Taylor’s termination in a chaotic way: Someone who was scheduled to conduct an A.M.A. flew to New York to visit the Reddit office and discovered a canceled appointment and no backup support. Our team got a panicked message — and we had no real idea what was going on. 
 
 As a result, we temporarily closed the subreddit to the public in order to figure out what to do next. Because IAmA is constantly watched by the Reddit community as well as the news media, we as moderators determined that the best course of action was to figure out how to proceed in private. We did not anticipate or intend for other communities to follow our lead as part of a protest. However, the support was overwhelming and echoed the sentiment our shutdown illustrated — anger at the way the company routinely demands that the volunteers and community accept major changes that reduce our efficiency and increase our workload. 
 
 We built our policies and procedures around having a professional partner at the company to substantiate, facilitate and respond to queries in a timely manner. We as a moderator team established a trusting relationship with her and relied heavily on that trust to operate the subreddit. Ms. Taylor did a great deal to make the A.M.A.s so successful: She worked directly with charities and agents to coordinate high-profile forums. She would walk participants through the basics of using Reddit, create verified accounts for them to use, and help them introduce themselves to the community. Now we are having to work around the lack of these resources, with a continued expectation of success. 
 
 The secondary purpose of shutting down was to communicate to the relatively tone-deaf company leaders that the pattern of removing tools and failing to improve available tools to the community at large, not merely the moderators, was an affront to the people who use the site. 
 
 Reddit’s interim chief executive, Ellen Pao, has said that the recent events were the result of miscommunication. “We have apologized for not communicating better with the moderators,” Ms. Pao told NPR. 
 
 We feel strongly that this incident is more part of a reckless disregard for the company’s own business and for the work the moderators and users put into the site. Dismissing Victoria Taylor was part of a long pattern of insisting the community and the moderators do more with less. 
 
 Advertisement Continue reading the main story 
 
 Miscommunication implies there was any communication at all or any kind of real planning in place to compensate for the loss, when in reality the moderators and A.M.A. guests were left stranded. Though company leaders have apologized publicly, they still have not fully explained the decision. 
 
 Our goal is not to cripple Reddit or hinder the community. We are all the community. And we want Reddit to remain vibrant. We have put in thousands of hours over the years toward making these communities excellent. 
 
 We are disheartened by the dismissal of Victoria Taylor, who was one of the most high-profile women at the company — and in the technology field. We hope Reddit recruits someone with the talent and necessary background to fill her position in a similar capacity. The community on the whole has also spoken quite loudly: Pay attention to the user base. Users are not simply a screaming mob. They are actually asking for reasonable support, and as moderators, we are trying very hard to do what we can to make those changes happen.
– Reddit's ex-talent director is speaking out for the first time since she was unceremoniously fired last week. In a post on Reddit (obviously), Victoria Taylor, who ran "Ask Me Anything" interviews, writes that her weekend was "interesting, to say the least" but gives no details on why she was let go. Instead, she says she's figuring out what's next for her and thanks the Reddit community for its support and for showing that "your voices matter." In a since-deleted post on Quora—Gawker has a screenshot—the site's business and community leader Marc Bodnick did probe the reasons behind her departure. After speaking to "someone close to Reddit," he wrote that Taylor was hesitant to experiment with new AMA formats, including video, which management wanted. Bodnick also confirmed Reddit fired Taylor without notifying moderators, who were peeved. In a New York Times op-ed, two moderators explain exactly why they were upset and shut down the AMA subreddit. First, Reddit removed Taylor "without warning or providing alternative resources," they write. They say they first learned of her termination when an AMA guest turned up at Reddit's New York office to find "a canceled appointment and no backup support. Our team got a panicked message—and we had no real idea what was going on." While interim CEO Ellen Pao has put the issue down to miscommunication, the moderators say there was no communication at all. "Moderators and AMA guests were left stranded" by a move that shows "a reckless disregard for the company's own business and for the work the moderators and users put into the site," they write. "Dismissing Victoria Taylor was part of a long pattern of insisting the community and the moderators do more with less." (Many Redditors are unhappy with Pao.)