It's Not Just Marijuana. DEA is at War With Other Medicines Too.
The Washington Post has a disturbing piece that ought to broaden recent discussion of the conflict between the drug war and legitimate medical treatments. The DEA is taking legal medicines away from elderly people who need them:
Heightened efforts by the Drug Enforcement Administration to crack down on narcotics abuse are producing a troubling side effect by denying some hospice and elderly patients needed pain medication, according to two Senate Democrats and a coalition of pharmacists and geriatric experts.
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Terence McCormally, a doctor who cares for patients in nursing homes in Northern Virginia, said the tug of war reflects "the tension between the war on drugs and the war on pain.""For the doctor and the nurse, it's a nuisance," he said, "but for the patient it is needless suffering."
Our efforts to control the lives of people who take drugs for fun have led us to destroy the lives of people who take drugs for serious medical conditions. The harsh reality here is that the best medicines often become popular with people they weren't intended for. That's going to happen no matter what you do. But if every effective pain reliever is overly restricted, then the medicine's primary purpose of relieving pain can never be achieved.
The drug war has gone blind even to the most basic functions that drugs are supposed to serve in our society. As efforts to prevent diversion and recreational use continue their inevitable failure, we face a very real threat that desperate drug war bureaucrats will legislate many of our best medicines out of existence.
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none of this is new, it's been going on for awhile
Comment posted by meeneecat on Sat, 10/31/2009 - 4:38pmThis type of stuff has been going on for quite a while in the world of chronic pain, most pain patients are horrendously under treated, including those to whom adequate pain medication is denied to altogether. It's lead to probably one of the biggest epidemic of modern times...the lack of treatment of chronic pain...and most other countries have it 10x worse than the U.S., i.e. in Africa where the only "cure" for intractable pain is suicide, as doctors are not even allowed to prescribe small doses of opioid pain killers no matter what the situation. In the U.S. there have been cases of pain patients committing suicide after their doctors were arrested for the alleged "crime" of prescribing "too much" pain medication to patients (despite the effectiveness and safety of higher dose opioid therapy being well proven).
Still, the DEA thinks that forcing millions of pain patients to needlessly suffer by preventing them from having the medicine that they need in order to stop a minuscule amount people from taking opioids for recreational purposes is somehow a worthy cause. We should all recognize the cruelty of this policy, unfortunately many people, including legislators don't get it, until by it happens to be themselves or a loved one who is suffering from excruciating pain.
And of course, the DEA's methods are ineffective, but even as the bodies and casualties pile up, the drug warriors still maintain that all this collateral damage, pain patients and others caught in the cross fire is somehow necessary.
I recommend watching:
"When Cops play Doctor: How the Drug War Punishes Pain Patients"
and
Interview with Dr. Deluca: War on Doctors / Pain Crisis
As a pain patient myself, I can tell you, that everything Dr. Deluca says in his interview is so true. There are thousands of pain patients who are forced to spend their days home bound in bed, all while there exists out there a safe and effective medicine that would give many of us our lives back and allow many of us to go back to work and/or participate in some of the other things we enjoy. But that medicine is being denied to us, because of a cruel, inhumane and ineffective drug war. Imagine if the gov't started denying cancer medicines to cancer patients? That it akin to what is being done to pain patients...and this should be a concern to everyone, because chances are either you or a loved one will, at some point in their lives, need to be treated for pain.
You got that right!
Comment posted by mlang52 on Thu, 10/29/2009 - 9:50pmIts even more disgusting to loose your profession over compassionate care of people suffering from chronic pain! It is severely depressing, in fact for one to know all of those years spent learning the trade are wasted, as the result of the actions of a a bunch of undereducated politicians and lawyers!