USA Today's coverage of DEA's new pain medicine regulations (also blogged here) 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, revoked, and revised 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, 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 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 about medical marijuana. And all of it's wrong.
If only she were a doctor...
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