Many chronic pain patients, who don’t suffer from cancer or other fatal diseases, worry they will become the casualties in the battle against the opioid epidemic.

“It’s like a war on chronic pain patients,” said Jaqueline Schneider, a 56-year-old Pittsburgh woman who suffers from two rare spine diseases. “Nobody mentions legitimate pain patients. It’s like we have the plague.”

She calls what is happening now “opioid hysteria,” saying the federal government’s “overzealous tactics … are creating fear in the chronic pain community.”

Many doctors and pharmacists fear they may become targets and are limiting the opioids they prescribe or distribute, she said. “It’s all trickling down.”

She is hardly alone in those fears.

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Dennis Ewing Sr., a 61-year-old disabled printer in San Antonio, takes the equivalent of 135 mg of morphine a day for his intense spinal pain.

The U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention has recommended health care providers prescribe no more than a 90 mg morphine equivalent and justify it whenever they go beyond that amount.

If reduced to that limit, “I wouldn’t be functional at all,” Ewing said, adding that he fears he might commit suicide in that case. “It scares the hell out of me.”

He has already changed pain doctors because the previous one took away his longtime prescription for muscle relaxers, which are the only way he can sleep, he said.

He knows he is physically dependent on opioids and would encounter withdrawal if he went off the drug, “but I’m not an addict,” he said. “I’ve been fighting this pain since the 1990s.”

He said he’s been in eight car wrecks, mostly people running into him, and he said his wife has been in almost as many. She, too, must take painkillers, he said.

“We’ve been in multiple collisions where people have driven into us,” he said. “There’s something wrong with every level of my spine.”

He used to spend hours a day in his wood shop, but now if he spends 30 minutes a week, “I’ve accomplished something,” he said. “All these things have been taken away by pain. Medication gives us something, rather than just sitting in the corner and crying.”

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He believes the answer to the opioid epidemic and other drug woes in the nation are simple — legalize all drugs, tax them and use the monies to fund drug treatment.

“I’m about as conservative as you can get,” he said. “Treatment is the answer, not incarceration.”

Donna Corley, director of the Arachnoiditis Society for Awareness and Prevention, said there are no quick fixes for the opioid epidemic.

She noted that painkiller prescriptions have been declining since 2015, but deaths are increasing, mostly because of illicit heroin and fentanyl.

Those who become addicted to opioids should have a program that offers them safer medications to kick the habit, she said. “My experience in working with addicts is they will not choose rehab unless they are ready to quit.”

Physicians should test patients’ hormones, vitamin and similar levels, she said. “If you are not treating the whole body, it doesn’t do much good.”

Schneider discounted talk of how addictive opioids are. “They say, ‘You take one opioid, and you’re addicted,'” she said. “That’s really not true because I’m a perfect example. Opioids have given me a sliver of quality of life.”

She said of the 1,110 people on two Facebook support groups involving this spine diseases, arachnoiditis and Tarlov cysts, she doesn’t know of any who have overdosed.

Fatal overdoses on prescription opioids were five times higher in 2016 than in 1999, according to the CDC. During that time, more than 200,000 Americans have died from prescription opioid overdoses.

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Schneider said most overdose deaths these days are due to illicit fentanyl and heroin. More than 20,000 Americans overdosed on fentanyl and related drugs in 2016, and more than 15,000 overdosed on heroin.

Of the more than 42,000 Americans who fatally overdosed on opioids in 2016, 40 percent of those overdoses came at the hands of prescription opioids.

As for those numbers, Schneider said many opioid abusers mix other medications and sometimes add alcohol.

Last year, more than 250 cities, counties and states filed lawsuits against opioid makers, promoters and distributors.

If those lawsuits settle, some of the money should go into pain research and aiding chronic pain patients, Schneider said.

She called addiction “a choice. I have a disease. I don’t have a choice. You have a choice to be cured. I don’t. I will never have a day without disease in my life.”

Dr. Anna Lembke, chief of addiction medicine at Stanford University Medical Center, said addiction affects about 16 percent of Americans.

Despite campaigns, addiction remains “a marginalized and stigmatized behavior,” she said. “Some people still believe that people who die from addiction deserve the bad things that happen to them. But nobody who uses substances starts out planning to get addicted. It can happen to anyone.

“Until we start treating addiction like a disease and build a robust infrastructure within medicine to treat it, we will not get a handle on this opioid epidemic.”