USA Today's coverage [8] of DEA's new pain medicine regulations (also blogged here [9]) contains this unbelievable quote from DEA Administrator Karen Tandy:
"The DEA does not belong in the practice of medicine. We want doctors to be able to prescribe drugs when people are in pain. We're trying to give them a comfort level."
Truer words have never been spoken more disingenuously. Tandy has presided over an unprecedented assault on the medical profession. In two years' time, her agency has arbitrarily clarified [10], revoked [11], and revised [12] the rules that determine when the most miserable among us will be offered relief. Immobilized by agony, the true victims of DEA's misguided witch-hunt have suffered in silence, some driven to suicide [13], as fear-stricken pain specialists trade in their Oxy for Advil.
Tandy has played doctor indeed, and she's done so capriciously; perpetrating a shell-game with policies that affect millions, seemingly to convict one doctor [14] who should never have been targeted to begin with.
Nor has Tandy's negligent quackery been confined to the realm of pain-management. For a woman who, by her own account, "doesn't belong in the practice of medicine", Tandy has a lot to say [15] about medical marijuana. And all of it's wrong [16].
If only she were a doctor...