re: Is anyone else having trouble getting pain medication?

I do not claim to understand drug addiction, but I do sympathize with people who if they find it readily available, will abuse it. Unfortunately, there are those who truly need pain medication occasionally, know better than to abuse it, but now cannot get it because of the abuse and the overreaction to same. In England, you can buy codeine and paracetamol combinations over the counter in much the way you can buy pseudoephedrine in the US. It is too bad it cannot be done here for those who need it for acute or chronic pain. I guess people in the US would buy twenty boxes at once and kill themselves by poisoning their liver with acetaminophen.