Hopeful,
You seem so torn about your abf's "legitimate" need for pain medication and his obvious opiate addiction.
Here is a quote from Dr. Drew Pinsky:
"Many patients begin opiate use in an attempt to control a common symptom: back pain. They are never told, oftentimes, that opiates perpetuate the symptoms for which they are taking the medication in the first place. This is not to say that every opiate user with back pain must immediately stop their medication.
I can, however, share with you that I have never admitted a patient to my chemical dependency unit for whom pain, wherever it was localized, did not improve markedly with discontinuing opiates.
The brain will go to great lengths to get the drug to which it has become addicted. This includes distorting the individual's feelings and thought processes and, many times, causing pain.
Since denial is a defining feature of addiction, even when the addiction has been accidentally triggered through appropriate medical management, a patient will fight fiercely against the suggestion that he or she is an addict. Denial fuels righteous indignation: "What do you mean? I just want my pain controlled." More often than not, neither the patient nor the physician understands the difficulty of coming to terms with the opiate's addictive effect on the brain."
Hopeful, the switch has been thrown in your abf's brain. He is now a drug addict, and how he came to it is no longer the issue. He is a full-blown opiate addict, like any heroin shooter, and he will manipulate his environment and everyone in it in order to keep using.
Let go of your fretting about his pain and see him for what he is today: a DRUG ADDICT. If you do this, you will be able to do all the right things in your codependency that will keep you from going down the tubes and that will also bring a stop to your ENABLING him.
Your abf is, in essence, a junkie. With that fact in mind, take the actions you need to take. His addict brain is running the show now, it is a selfish, drug-seeking brain, and you are standing in its way.
However it can, that brain is going to try to control YOU--through making you afraid to lose him, through evoking your sympathy for him, through depleting your self-esteem, through curling you in a ball of agony in your dark bed--so you will be so crippled that you will no longer be a threat to the addiction.
There is hope for all drug addicts. But there is always less of it when the people who love them obsess on them, try to control and woo them, and who support the addiction by cooperating blindly with it.
Get serious help for yourself......and then a happy ending may be possible. If you do not get help, I can guarantee the chance of a happy ending drops to zero.
My prayer is for your peace of mind and health.