Is this a safe way to get pain relief?

Yeah they can stop that stuff from coming in. But it's a double rip off as Codeine is over the counter medication in most civilized countries, Co-Codamol is probably the best selling. But your buddy doesn't need it. If he's going to need something fairly regularly for pain that's stronger than available over the counter drugs, he needs to replace his primary care physician. It's easy for people to forget that doctors are our employees, we their employers, and if there's a fundamental difference in agreement on health matters, it's foolish to waste money on a physician that won't listen. You don't have to leave the country because you are in pain. One phone call to his insurer is all it takes.

He should not be afraid to interview new physicians. Ask friends, family, people he knows with similar conditions. God I hate to think about how much pain he has endured because he's given this one inadequate, ignorant, ridiculously narcophobic person so much control over his life. Doctors are there to improve the quality of your life. This physician is failing miserably. To not even consider a referral to someone who knows what they are doing with pain (and that's why they aren't be prescribed. The physician's knowledge about these drugs comes from TV crime dramas and sensationalist journalism, not any actual study of medicine.), this is just inexcusable. Supposing your friend had diabetes and the physician had the same fear of insulin. This is not a person of medicine, they are more of a sham than the doctors who write prescriptions for narcotics for a paper cut.

Sorry if I sound like I am jumping up and down on my soapbox. I am, I am just sorry to sound like it. There is so much more that comes from untreated chronic pain. I can't count the number of people I have talked to that actually tried killing themselves over a doctors unreasonable fear, until they broke free from this insanity. It's not just pain and if your friend ever get to a doctor with any knowledge at all about pain, he'll learn a lot about the physical affects of untreated pain on the brain. It may be an organ that this physician may not use extensively, but most people do.

Look I can go on like this forever. Let me just close real fast by telling you that drugs like

co codamol and the entire hydrocodone family of drugs in the US are booby trapped with enough acetaminophen in them to cause liver failure if used outside of (or sometimes even within) label directions. Look hydrocodone up in Wikipedia if you think that's far fetched and too sinister to be true.. It's a huge danger to people in pain and it goes for any form of acetaminophen, call it tylenol or paracetamol. Ibuprofen is not much better, nor any medications in the NSAID class. But as long as this poison is mixed with a narcotic, they can blame narcotics for deaths actually cause by Tylenol and similar drugs. It would be a bigger deal if the entire drug industry was not built on Acetaminophen.

Don't waste your money on worthless, even dangerous drugs that may never get there. Self medication is the biggest reason people get addicted. Very few people with real chronic pain ever get addicted as they see real doctors who know what they are doing with pain medication (last figure I saw was I believe 1.3% up from 0.7% last decade vs about 9% in the general population, from NIDA, I want to say.). Don't stop the anti depressants suddenly either. They should be re-evaluated and continued, changed, or tapered off of. 18 hours of sleeping is no quality of life either. That's what it's all about, quality of life. Get your friend to a real doctor. Suppose there's a real cure out there for his pain and his physician is afraid of that too?