My mom will be 88 next month and until last year she had a prescription for vicodin to help with the chronic pain she suffers after forty years as a nurse on her feet in hospitals coupled with her advanced age. The DEA pressured her doctor, a legitimate MD, to cut back on the number of vicodin prescriptions she was writing so she asked to stop giving my mom the medication. By that point the vicodin was ineffective anyway, if it ever did any good - if my mom's like me the stuff is useless for pain-, so we switched her to straight tylenol. She has done alright with this, but I have no doubt that there are multitudes of people who should get this type of drug but can't, not because of the abusers themselves but because of yet another backfired government program that hurts innocent people in the name of "justice". Makes me sick.