YOU BET YOUR LIVELIHOOD

The following is an article that was published under my by-line at www.etherzone.com and www.libertyforall.net. It has received many comments and I solicit more YOU BET YOUR LIVELIHOOD - PART I TRYING TO DO THE RIGHT THING The following is the first part of my account of my recent encounter with the bureaucracy of the Florida Department of Health. It will be followed by others. I have tried to be as objective as possible but readers are encouraged to take my account with the customary grain of salt. I believe that this entire episode has lessons for all libertarians. “This letter is in reference to one of your patients and most importantly my only son and my heart, Douglas Fountain.” This histrionic emetic began a letter that I received from a patient’s mother, Karen Holden (not her real name, nor his) in July of 2005. It was the beginning of a nightmare that is not yet over. I had been treating her son for pain for about seven months. He had admitted to having abused drugs in the past and having been to a methadone clinic for addiction. He had stopped going to the clinic and when he first came to my office, he was very forthright about having used street drugs in the interim for his pain. He also stated that he had been diagnosed with chronic kidney stones, passing at least twenty per year. I did some preliminary laboratory work that supported his contention of having kidney stones, ordered x-rays and prescribed what I felt would be a good starting dose of pain medication, an amount that was less than what he said he had been using. The letter went on about how her son was a drug addict and that his condition did not merit the methadone I was prescribing for him. She demanded that I stop treating him and wrote that if anything happened to him she’d hold me responsible and do whatever she could to put me and ‘irresponsible doctors such as me’ out of business. She also wrote that it wasn’t a threat! I telephoned the woman and told her that because of her son’s age, he was 30 (sic) at the time, and federal HIPAA laws, I could neither confirm nor deny that he was even a patient. She went on to claim that he had been in and out of rehab several times. I told her that my obligation was to him as a patient and that I needed a statement from an official source such as a police report, a physician, a hospital, a rehab facility or a pharmacy. Instead she filed a complaint with the Florida licensing board. I first learned of the complaint through a letter from the local investigator. She sent a copy of the mother’s complaint with it. Here’s where it gets interesting. Right on the face sheet, there is a section that calls for ‘documentation indicating appointment of Legal Authority/Guardianship’ of the complainant is ‘other than the patient or parent of a minor’. That sentence has three asterisks before and after it. There was no documentation provided. The investigator served a subpoena for all of my records with which I complied. She corresponded with the mother and patient who declined to sign a letter of interest in the outcome and complained that his mother had ‘stuck her nose into his business’. The problem with complying was that I had left the clinic where I had first treated Douglas Fountain and that I had testified against the owner and manager in a federal fraud case while the records were still in the hands of the owner’s son, who had taken over. So, the records were compromised, which my attorney later protested, to no avail. Then the local investigator sent the entire file to the licensing board attorney, J. Blake Hunter. The first thing to understand about government attorneys is that just like a lot of other government employees, they couldn’t get jobs in the private sector. With lawyers especially, they use a few years in government service to burnish their credentials and develop contacts so they can go to work after a few years for a private concern. It’s an old game. One of his predecessors, after a stint in the office, now specializes in representing the type of physicians he used to prosecute. Need some cynicism? Hunter then chose a physician, Dr. Sherrie W. Pinsley who had placed herself in the board’s name bank as a pain control expert. She had become an expert by joining The American Academy of Pain Management when it was first organized. It’s a mixed group that includes physicians, podiatrists, dentists, physical therapists, chiropractors and others. It later began a certification procedure that extended certification to various members. The information I elicited from the Academy itself was that she had never taken a certification test but rather had become certified by the familiar grandfather process. Hunter sent her the entire package of records for her review. She submitted her findings on my management to the board attorney. I thought it was one of the worst hatchet jobs I was ever exposed to. I had been trying to take care of a human being who was in pain and admitted to having abused drugs. I chose a medication that was developed as a replacement for other more easily abused narcotics such as morphine and that he said had been helpful for him in the past. It is also widely accepted as a drug of low, but nevertheless potential, abuse with good analgesic properties. It has been used as a far less harmful medication than morphine since World War II. The pain of kidney stones is one of the worst there is. It is searing, deep, penetrating and often unrelenting. The tissues that line the ureter and urethra, the structures that convey urine from the kidney to the bladder and then from the bladder out of the body, are among the most sensitive in the body. Any stone that moves within either, causes pain that can be excruciating. The bladder is big enough that stones there are often asymptomatic. Medications far more potent than methadone are often necessary to control it. Pinsley seized on every possible thing that she could, starting with the initial amount of methadone as being excessive. She tore apart my records. I also prescribed a tranquilizer for him, Xanax, one of the most widely prescribed medications in the world and one that is frequently used in combination with pain medications. She stated there was no justification for them and when I increased the dose, she challenged that as unjustified also. Hunter for his part took her findings, and used them in a settlement offer wherein he demanded more than $15,000. in fines, penalties and administrative fees as well as certain courses be taken. What’s more he felt that it was a fair offer! That’s the government’s idea of fair. This was my introduction to The Florida Department of Health’s policing of its licensees. More in Part II. YOU BET YOUR LIVELIHOOD - PART II TRYING TO FIGHT BACK The following is the second part of my account of my recent encounter with the bureaucracy of the Florida Department of Health. It will be followed by others. I have tried to be as objective as possible but readers are encouraged to take my account with the customary grain of salt. I believe that this entire episode has lessons for all libertarians. It was then I hired an attorney. I probably should have earlier but I really thought that I had done nothing that was of any danger to the patient and I hadn’t and that because of that, I had nothing to worry about. Choosing an attorney is often a crap shoot. Panic stricken, I called my state society and inquired about legal representation. I was referred to one individual of supposed expertise in such matters. He offered me two choices for representation, one costing $20,000. and the other costing $40,000. Having the assets for neither, I found an attorney with an excellent reputation in criminal law. Unfortunately, licensing law falls under administrative law. It has its own peculiar wrinkles and is similar to traffic court but the chances of actually winning are far poorer than traffic court. Another example is tax court administrative law, such as with the IRS. In medical administrative law, at least in Florida, the deck is stacked against the physician. I sent my attorney a letter of rebuttal to Pinsley’s findings that he sent unchanged, with the exception of one deleted paragraph. He added a few of his own. Eventually, my attorney moved for the dismissal of the complaint over the asterisked sentence that called for proof of guardianship if the patient was an adult. Hunter responded that, by statute, anyone could submit a complaint and it could even be anonymously and was upheld. That will be important to remember, also. He also stated that the government could continue in its prosecution of a case even if the original complainant withdrew the complaint. I had first treated the patient at one clinic but then I left. He was then treated by a subsequent physician at that clinic, the one whose original owners I had testified against, but Hunter persistently tried to fine me for those visits. It was only after two or three exchanges, plus him being advised at least three separate times by his own investigator, that he relented in charging me with those visits. The exchanges continued. Hunter’s letters were worded with guarded threats. He wrote that if I didn’t accept his already outrageous proposal of settlement, the case would be assigned to an Administrative Law Judge and ‘If we prevail..., we will be able to recoup the costs of our investigation and prosecution of this matter.’ That’s legalese for pay now or it will be worse later. I did some further investigation of Dr. Pinsley’s background. I found out that she wasn’t a member of any of the usual professional organizations, such as national or state medical societies. Interestingly, that excluded her from abiding by the ethics rules that bind the members. We pointed that out to Hunter and he responded that it was his impression that she was. I then rechecked all my sources and it turned out that I was correct. Dr. Pinsley was not a member of any of the usual medical societies throughout the entire matter. This, in addition to the likely fact that she had never taken a certification examination did not deter Hunter from maintaining that she was a valid ‘expert’. We pointed out to Hunter numerous errors on Pinsley’s part in her review. For one, she stated that there was no signature nor a date on the physical examination form, yet my initials were there and the date next to them. Dr. Pinsley stated that she saw no evidence of the patient being referred to a specialist yet, right in the progress notes for the first few visits, I cited that the patient needed to see a specialist. There was one very telling final observation by the ‘expert’, Dr. Pinsley. She stated ‘There were insufficient records that were provided to reflect all of the visits.’ This was exactly what we had protested to Hunter from the get-go. We felt that the records were compromised due to them being in the hands of the subsequent clinic that I had testified against. One of the most interesting criticisms she made was that I relied on the patient to determine my treatment. She objected to this. Yet one of the major complaints throughout the country, is that physicians do not take the time to listen to their patients! The upshot was that the State continued in its full prosecution but finally, Hunter relented and accepted that I had not treated the patient on the disputed dates and dropped the charges for those dates from his complaint. He was still demanding more than $12,300. in penalties and administrative fees and still threatening that it would cost far more should I decide to fight it and lose. I had seen the patient a total of eleven times, making the cost of treating this patient more than $1,100.00 per visit. Such is the status of administrative law in this country today and that’s what our government, and people like J. Blake Hunter, consider justice. YOU BET YOUR LIVELIHOOD - PART III SURRENDERING The following is the third part of my account of my recent encounter with the bureaucracy of the Florida Department of Health. It will be followed by others. I have tried to be as objective as possible but readers are encouraged to take my account with the customary grain of salt. I believe that this entire episode has lessons for all libertarians. Because of a change in employers, I decided to change attorneys. The new attorney and I sat down and, after discussing options, agreed that it would be better if I accepted the settlement offer from Hunter, as unjustified and excessive as it was. Partly due to some mis-communication and the peculiar procedures of administrative law, some options, such as retaining our own experts, had passed. I sat down with my new attorney and we decided that it was best to accept the state’s settlement offer. The reason is, as he explained, you almost never win, at least in the State of Florida. They have stacked the deck in their favor, as only government can. And, as Hunter wrote, in his letters, if you lose then you are also responsible for additional costs. It’s a chance only the wealthiest can take. My case was heard on May 18 at around noon in Jacksonville, Florida at one of the most expensive hotels in town, the Crowne Suites. That must be part of the reason for high costs and penalties. Leave it to government to mug you and expect you to pay for the injury to its fist. Board members sat at folding banquet tables arranged in a U-shape. Across the open end of the U were two folding tables, one for the two Department of Health attorneys separated by a pillar from the other table for various subjects of the prosecutions and their attorneys. The pillar blocked each from seeing the other. Those awaiting their turn sat in the back of the room. Hunter’s performance confirmed my impression of him as a bureaucratic bully. During the proceedings before mine, one elderly physician was called to finalize his case. He stated that he wanted to clear up his license and then retire. One of the Board members indicated sympathy saying that in the interest of compassion, the Board should look favorably on his request. Hunter objected, calling himself a ‘non-compassionate’ attorney. In another case, Hunter objected with the standard prosecutor’s statement, “Ignorance of the law is no excuse.” During one interview, I think it was the one with the elderly physician who was trying to retire. Hunter brought up some particular point. My attorney leaned over to me and whispered that’s why you need a lawyer at these things, indicating that Hunter should never have been allowed to introduce that unchallenged. Comments on that and many other items later in this series. These things should tell you all you need to know about people like J. Blake Hunter and the status of the law in this country. I felt like going over to him and spitting in his face but I realized it would be wrong to contaminate my spit. Our turn came and went without a hitch. I accepted the imposition of fines totaling $12,300 and the requirement to take two courses, one on pain narcotics prescriptions and another on record keeping. My attorneys’ fees have exceeded $3,600, which I believe is part of the object of the entire process. For their part, the Board members seemed to take a much more flexible and amenable tack than Hunter and his cohort in coercion, some female attorney whose name I didn’t catch. They asked a few questions and accepted my answers without much dispute. Complainants are permitted to speak at these sessions, much as victim’s and their family’s are permitted to speak at trials. They are also notified of the hearings so they can appear. Karen Holden, the mother of the patient who was so concerned about her son’s condition, didn’t speak during my session. I don’t think she was even present. She had responded to one of the notices that her son was then, she was so thankful, in rehab and indicated her continued commitment to stop me from practicing. Her son, the supposed victim of my prescribing malfeasance, Douglas Fountain, was on record with Wendy Foy, the original investigator, as upset that his mother had intervened in his affairs. He was not there either. We walked out of the meeting, my wife, my attorney and I. My wife and I headed home wondering how we will ever pay the fines. I’m looking into a change of career to avoid having to pay them. I’d love to be able to tell them to go to hell. YOU BET YOUR LIVELIHOOD - PART IV DOES THAT TEACH YOU A LESSON? The following is the fourth part of my account of my recent encounter with the bureaucracy of the Florida Department of Health. It will be followed by others. I have tried to be as objective as possible but readers are encouraged to take my account with the customary grain of salt. I believe that this entire episode has lessons for all libertarians. Now we can begin some lessons. Among the first observations that anyone makes, almost all the time, is that the patient was thirty, so the mother should have had no legal standing in the case. In fact, as I noted in Part I of this series, the sentence requesting proof of guardianship in the case of an adult was set off by three asterisks, both before and after it, which would seem to any ordinary person to emphasize its importance. The law and logic do not apply to government and this is a theme I will be hitting upon straight through the rest of this series. Yet, Hunter must have been upheld because the complaint was not dismissed. Then someone used a wrong form. Will he be disciplined in any way? As he stated, anyone can issue a complaint and it can even be anonymously. Whatever happened to confronting your accusers in court? The convenience here is that the state comes in as the accuser and, even if the accuser retracts, the state is entitled to continue with the prosecution. Have citizens spy on each other for crimes against the state and then have the state take over. How convenient for Leviathan. The Stasi, KGB and Gestapo live! Dr. Pinsley was another matter. Although she was listed by the Board as a family physician, she was not certified. She presented herself as a pain expert and was supported by Hunter even though she had, apparently, never taken a certification examination. That was sufficient for him. I just recently spoke to another attorney in another matter and he told me that they scrape the bottom of the barrel to get their witnesses against licensees. His partner was involved in defending a physician before a Florida board. There are three major pain study groups in the country. According to the people I met at a pain management meeting, certification by her American Academy of Pain Management was held in the lowest esteem. This mattered naught to the state. You would think that since Dr. Pinsley constantly referred to ‘standards of care’ throughout her evaluation that she would be some type of paragon of mainstream care. Think again. An internet search shows Dr. Sherrie W. Pinsley as a provider of chelation therapy, a very controversial treatment. It involves flushing the system with products, one being EDTA, which then carries problematic matters out of the body. Chelation therapy is used for iron and lead poisoning. The body is infused with the EDTA and then it combines with the lead or iron and is passed out of the system. After having this done, some observers thought that it improved atherosclerosis and consequently heart and vascular disease and they started using it for that. It has had its proponents and opponents ever since, some labeling it as a miracle cure and others as quackery (see www.quackwatch.com). The following is from the WebMD website: “Some health professionals have also used chelation therapy to treat atherosclerosis and/or coronary artery disease, although there is not enough scientific evidence to prove that this treatment is effective. Some people believe that EDTA binds with calcium deposits (the part of plaque that obstructs the flow of blood to the heart) in the arteries, and then EDTA "cleans out" the calcium deposits from the arteries, reducing the risk of heart problems. This treatment is controversial, and research results have been inconsistent.” And Dr. Pinsley felt that I didn’t meet approved standards of care. My attitude has always been that if people want it and are willing to pay for it and it’s harmless, why not try it. Problem is, some don’t regard it as harmless. Point being that one of its practitioners saw fit to judge my treatment, which is far less controversial. Combine that with the known fact that every government agency uses informants who are often criminals themselves and you arrive at Lesson #1: The bottom of the barrel is never too low for the government. The next point is about the choice of an attorney. There was a time when, if you were accused by the government of any kind of a crime, it was a pretty straightforward matter to choose an attorney. You would choose a criminal attorney. Not so anymore. Administrative law is such an entity unto itself that the accused needs someone proficient in that particular aspect of administrative law. Today, there are attorneys who limit themselves to specific occupational licensing laws, not just licensing laws in general. The subject of the complaint has no way of knowing this, the government knows it and relies on it so it can bully the people. That’s why they set the system up that way. Ostensibly, the defendant is presumed innocent but in almost every administrative court in the land, he must prove his innocence. F. Lee Bailey might have trouble defending a client before a licensing board for simple familiarity with procedures which differs considerably from most criminal charges. A neophyte prosecutor could easily win in such a case. Which really gets to the philosophic crux of the matter. The law is supposed to be a readily understandable and a logical extension of society’s requirement to protect its citizens. If you cause harm to another, you face charges. In cases such as this, there is no such connection. According to one person’s interpretation, I didn’t meet some arbitrary standard of treatment and record keeping. No one was harmed! No one even came close to being harmed! Further, it’s the way it is in almost all administrative law, from traffic court to tax and licensing courts. The defendant is guilty and must prove his innocence! For many years, physicians across the country have been reluctant to treat pain due to fears of prosecution. As a result, patients with true pain have suffered, even to the point where terminal cancer patients have been denied adequate pain control even as they approach death. To remedy this, many states, Florida among them, have set up what they maintain are guidelines that ensure that physicians can treat pain appropriately without fear from governing authorities. Nothing could be further from the truth. More and more physicians in this state and others are simply giving up because they do not want the hassle or to take a chance, as I did. I ha ve been told by a high-ranking member of a Florida professional society that it is the unstated goal of the Department of Health to eliminate the practice of pain control in this state. I agree. The function of all these agencies, including traffic administrative law, is not to protect the public. If it were, they would simply provide instruction for improvement. No. Their function is to raise revenues for The Leviathan State so they can apply and even extend the reach of their power. That’s another take home lesson. There will be others. YOU BET YOUR LIVELIHOOD - PART V BIG BROTHER IS WATCHING YOU! The following is the fifth part of my account of my recent encounter with the bureaucracy of the Florida Department of Health. It will be followed by others. I have tried to be as objective as possible but readers are encouraged to take my account with the customary grain of salt. I believe that this entire episode has lessons for all libertarians. Most American physicians have been reluctant to treat pain because of the situation I have encountered. They are afraid of being prosecuted, as I was. They should be. There have been two contradictory forces at work for many years in this country. The overweening presence has always been the federal government and the possibility of prosecution for inappropriate prescribing. Of course, inappropriate is an elastic term that can be shaped to conform with the view of the authorities that apply it. Then there are the state authorities and sometimes local. It’s a labyrinthine morass with dangers at every turn and conformity with one, in no way guarantees conformity with the others. Then, about twenty five years ago, after a lot of publicity about under-treated pain, various government agencies began to draft what they called ‘guidelines’ for the treatment of pain which, they assured the public, they wanted to be done. The guidelines are supposed to ensure that patients will have adequate treatment for their pain and protect the physician who elects to treat pain. Like so much else government does, it winds up not working that way. Whether traffic tickets, OSHA, EPA or drug violations, it winds up as an ancillary revenue source with intimidation, subtle extortion and the trampling of the rights of the people. Not coincidentally, it demonstrates the superiority of the state and demeans the people. It is easily demonstrable in my case. It wasn’t conducted as a co-operative endeavor but right from the get-go, it was prosecutorial. In fact, in The State of Florida, all these matters, including many, if not all, medical malpractice cases, are investigated by the Prosecution Unit of The Department of Health. Talk about putting carts before horses! It is crucial to appreciate that the bar for the admission of evidence in administrative law is so low as to be almost non-existent. Anything can and is introduced as evidence. And to challenge it, you would have to have legal training to recognize that it isn’t admissible. If the government attempts to introduce anything and it is not challenged, it is accepted. Of course, it requires legal expertise which in turn means more work for the lawyers who love these things. And if the prosecution gets its ‘evidence’ in, it’s that much closer to winning its case. Thus you have the travesties of traffic, tax and licensure courts. You almost never win and if you challenge it and lose, it costs even more. What is philosophically wrong with all of this? It’s simple. As in so many other cases, there was no allegation of any injury, just as in traffic court and other administrative courts. In essence, the infractions are crimes against the state. You have to read that again; crimes against the state. Sound familiar? Just as with speeding and other traffic violations, no one is hurt but the government maintains that someone might have been and that is the crime. This is where we have turned the corner to tyranny. In cases such as mine, as Hunter wrote, the government needs only a complaint, and it can be anonymous. Citizens as spies on each other. Does that sound familiar? For their parts, government officials can invoke a statute which ‘requires’ them to investigate. They then hide all of their malfeasances and even criminality behind a wall of Sovereign Immunity. Unless an outright egregious affront to pubic sensibilities, such as the Michael Nifong Duke Lacrosse Rape Case, the J. Blake Hunters of the world know they are beyond prosecution and act accordingly. But for every Duke Lacrosse Rape Case, there are a thousand cases like this. Sovereign Immunity is a recipe for government arrogance and resentment by the governed. There is evidence that some of The Founding Fathers were opposed to the principle. One of the most telling and damning of Hunter’s comments that day was his assertion, “Ignorance of the law is no excuse.” Ignorance of the law is no excuse to people like Hunter because they live off it. It makes for great business for the legal profession to have extensive arcane laws, statutes and regulations. Every charge requires a rebuttal. There’s an old saying in law; “In a small town, one lawyer does poorly but two lawyers do well.” What they don’t care about is how far removed they are from logic and natural law and that they are, consequently, dangerous threats to our liberty and un-American. The average person in the street has a sense of what’s right and wrong and knows that most of our body of laws today are contrary to human nature. The goal is to punish normal human behavior and beat the public into submission. It is a small piece of a much broader plan. This was, not coincidentally, the goal of the Soviet Union and Germany under National Socialism. “If human nature does not conform to Marxist theory, human nature must change.” The penalties that were given me were completely disproportionate to the offenses. As I have emphasized, the patient wasn’t hurt, in any way. We have pedophiles drawing 60 day sentences, Martha Stewart drawing seven months for lying to investigators. Vehicular homicide gets three to five years while Wall Street bigwigs go away for ten years for various frauds. Human life must be worth less than government’s nanny state laws and regulations. Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn wrote about the similar disparities in the Gulag between violent crimes and crimes against the state, where the latter routinely drew much harsher sentences. Under Stalin, Mao and Pol Pot, farmers who took some grain for their own family were often shot while rapists and murderers drew ten years. I have been told by a very high ranking lay member of a state professional society that The Department of Health wants to eliminate the practice of pain control in Florida. At various meetings I have attended since the beginning of my situation, many physicians have said that they just don’t handle pain cases anymore because they don’t want the hassle. State officials maintain that, if they follow the guidelines they have nothing to fear. Like Ronald Reagan once said, “The most frightening ten words in the English language are ‘I’m from the government and I’m here to help you.’” YOU BET YOUR LIVELIHOOD - PART VI MORE LESSONS The following is the sixth part of my account of my recent encounter with the bureaucracy of the Florida Department of Health. I have tried to be as objective as possible but readers are encouraged to take my account with the customary grain of salt. I believe that this entire episode has lessons for all libertarians. Vladimir Ilyich Ulyanov, better known as Lenin, the architect of the Soviet Union, once said that when it comes time to hang the last capitalist, there will be another to sell you the rope. This entire episode verifies that. The government has hired vast bureaucracies to enforce its edicts, no matter how unreasonable. Lenin was right. J. Blake Hunter is paid a healthy salary to harass physicians who are trying to function and take care of people. Wendy Foy, the original investigator is also. They are each, just one person in a much larger department that has many more of them. Taken all together, none of them adds much to the health delivery system of the state nor the country. The costs of dealing with them are inevitably passed onto patients and consequently increase the total cost of medical care that all the politicians complain about. . When we pointed out to Hunter that there were subsequent physicians who treated the patient whose treatment was identical to mine and whose notes were no more comprehensive than mine, his response was a study in bureaucratic intransigence. (Those were the ones he tried to fine me for.) He wrote that I was free to file a complaint against those physicians but the department’s complaint against me stood. Notice, there was no consideration that perhaps their rules were wrong. Perish the thought. Government is never wrong in their peculiar calculus. Very early on in this entire matter, I was briefly represented by the attorney of the clinic at which I was working. I left that clinic under decidedly less than amiable circumstances. Both the attorney and I notified the local investigator, Wendy Foy, that she, the attorney, would no longer represent me. Yet when Hunter presented his initial settlement offer, he sent her a copy. This was evidence of his own ignorance for which he apologized but he was prosecuting me for a similar lapse. It also potentially compromised my standing with the clinic in future legal actions which the attorney herself has threatened. Yet when I complained to the state bar, it found no reason for proceeding but allowed that I might have legal recourse against him, of course, at my expense. Notice, for my ‘violation’, Hunter had his entire department’s resources at his disposal but I have to hire an attorney to take action for similar violations. And this is typical. There are numerous cases where government agencies commit ethical breeches, causing embarrassment or other damages, recompense for which the citizen must sue but yet they can turn around and simply assess the citizen penalties for similar lapses. It costs them nothing. And then they wonder why the public is so alienated from the government that is supposed to be its servant. Since my ordeal began, I have accumulated records of treatment of other patients by other physicians and in each case, it is obvious that their approaches were no different from mine, yet that doesn’t seem to matter. I can guarantee that if my treatment fell short of their ‘standards’ then so do theirs. This whole process began with licensing laws, a bane of libertarians. Their ostensible purpose was to protect the public. As Milton Friedman and other libertarian economists have shown they do nothing of the sort but they do protect physicians from competition. It continued with the Pure Food Act which later was expanded to include medications, through the Food and Drug Administration. Since all medications can be dangerous, pain medications especially, the Drug Enforcement Administration and other state and even private agencies have conspired to supervise all medication prescriptions in the country, in order to ‘protect’ the public, the Nanny State at its worst. So now it’s intruded into all aspects of medical practice, just as so many other government functions have started out with one small function only to intrude into many others. What happens to patients who are in severe pain from old injuries, surgeries or even cancer? If Florida is successful in its suspected goal of ending the practice of pain control in the state, where do they go? To The Department of Health and J. Blake Hunter and his counterparts? Or perhaps they go S. W. Pinsley and her counterparts, if any are left or perhaps that’s the goal. Limit the competition. It would be poetic justice for J. Blake Hunter or one of the other lackeys in the government to need pain treatment and be unable to find it. As poetic justice as that would be, it’s not nice. We now have the situation in this country that so many physicians have opted out of pain control, that patients are having to travel hundreds, even more than a thousand miles monthly to obtain the most basic of medical care that physicians take their sacred Hippocratic Oaths to provide. This in turn leads patients to flock to the few remaining physicians willing to. Which in turn, causes their offices to overflow and many questions to be raised by all sides. People, including the authorities, will look at the physician and assume he’s running a pill mill and he may very well be doing so. Is he catering to many patients who didn’t really need the medications and are just looking for a high? Of course, but at the same time, the physician is also taking care of people who truly need the medication but are assumed to be just ‘looking for the stuff’. How can anyone determine that? He can’t. In addition to being protected by Sovereign Immunity, they are also protected from actions against their jobs by various civil service laws and regulations. It’s virtually impossible to fire a government employee. Only the most egregious such as Michael Nifong get thrown to the wolves but that’s only when they become too much even for the government, which is really saying something, and usually it’s only because they become liabilities, as Nifong did. Politics to them is a means to the end. I’LL COVER THE END IN THE NEXT AND FINAL INSTALLMENT. YOU BET YOUR LIVELIHOOD - PART V II THE FINAL LESSONS The following is the seventh and final part of my account of my recent encounter with the bureaucracy of the Florida Department of Health. I have tried to be as objective as possible but readers are encouraged to take my account with the customary grain of salt. I believe that this entire episode has lessons for all libertarians. The Hunters of the world and their ilk will protest that they are only enforcing the law. What they don’t appreciate is that perhaps the law is wrong. That never enters their minds. These petty bureaucrats can never permit of anything that lessens their power and justifies their existence, but as Martin Luther King, Jr. observed, everything Hitler did was legal. In my case and those like it, the laws are so immoral as to be obscene. When did it become a crime to try to help your fellow man? One of the worst aspects of totalitarian societies, communist, national socialist, fascist, etc., is the necessary war they make against human nature. It is the normal course of affairs for human beings to interact with each other for their mutual benefit. These laws and regulations operate with a Marxist dictum that if human nature is contrary to their theory, then human nature must change, not the laws and regulations. Lawyers protest that we are a society of laws. They are wrong. We are a society of individual human beings and the law was meant to be the rules for our interaction for the preservation and advancement of liberty. Once the law blocks harmless and free exchange, then it no longer functions as an instrument for furtherance of our freedom and it is no longer legitimate but an instrument for tyranny and the enrichment of despots. One ultimate point in all of this is that when government goes beyond its legitimate function it is an agency for evil, as has been demonstrated numerous times. Friedrich Hayek showed how the worst rose to the top in Germany under National Socialism. The same happened under communist governments the world over. There can be no doubt that the Founding Fathers knew this which is why they wished to hamstring, at least, the federal government. As we have seen, the federal government has not kept its end of the bargain. Then neither have the state governments. With the collusion and conspiracy of the Congress, Courts and executive, all our governments, federal, states and local, have been involved in the destruction of our freedom. It is a conspiracy so immense yet so subtle, as to escape the cognizance of even the participants themselves who would all swear they are lovers of freedom and the American system. Yet they are scoundrels. Our nation has been laboring under some delusion, fostered by our leaders, that somehow our experience will be different from that of others throughout history, that somehow government service will attract the best and the brightest. I submit that my case is just one small example among many that gives the lie to that belief. More to the point, in far more cases than not, it’s the evil who seek power over others. In all of us, there is a capacity for evil. Government facilitates its emergence and the larger government gets, the greater the chances for evil to emerge and the greater evil that emerges. Far and away, almost of the evil that has been committed in the world for the past 250 years, has been in the name of government. This was especially so during the twentieth century with Germany, the Soviet Union, Red China, Cuba, Cambodia, Chile and Viet Nam. There is an un-American philosophy at work here, which they will not admit. They will not say the truth which is that the individual counts for nothing and the state for everything. That is their message. They will claim that they are subservient to the people but they are about as subservient as the Politburo, with about as much responsibility to the people. Morality, fairness and justice mean nothing. This is the only conclusion that can be reached. Another un-American aspect of this is the entire concept of administrative law. Our American system purposely separated our government into legislative, executive and judicial sectors. The English system purposely divided the justice system into separate sectors. Administrative law is a perversion of this. Its entirety falls under the executive branch, an unconstitutional and immoral process, immoral in that no one entity should be investigator, judge, jury and executioner. In this case, they all are paid from the same source. Could there be a greater source of corruption of the process? The supremacy of the state counts for everything. It is to be accomplished through humiliation, extortion and bullying and all are at the threat of a gun, the only thing government understands. And that’s another ultimate problem. By now, everyone is aware of Michael Nifong’s offenses. The man is a thug with a legal degree and behaved as one throughout the entire prosecution of those three Duke lacrosse players with all the arrogance we have come to expect from government officials. For one of his offenses, criminal contempt, he drew just a one day sentence. The only thing that can explain such a slap on the wrist is that, of course, it came from a colleague. Nifong, Hunter and the bar associations claim that justice is blind but, when it comes to their own, it’s evidently crippled also. But Nifong will face a lot more. The families of those boys will sue him and it will be interesting to see how all of that plays out; just how much Sovereign Immunity will protect him. He will try to invoke it. But Michael Nifong is just the tip of the iceberg. For every Nifong, there are a thousand, nay ten thousand, J. Blake Hunters plying their reigns of mini-terror. How do they get theirs or do they? It’s said that what goes around comes around, every dog has his day, you reap as you sow and time wounds all heels. I’m not so sure about that. Laws create criminals. In the Soviet Union, everyone was a criminal, which is exactly what someone like Hunter wants and I am certain that leeches, extortionists and bullies like him are proud of their work. We tried many German and Japanese high officials after World War II but none of the lower operatives without whom many of those massive crimes could not have been committed. For the concentration camps, there were guards, engineers, cooks, etc. But our tyranny is a much subtler kind and Nifong could not have brought his fiasco to the level he did without the able assistance and cooperation of tens, maybe hundreds of his own Hunters, police officers and other members of his prosecutor’s office. What about them? As I reported in one of the earlier installments, the Bar Association refused to discipline Hunter despite an obvious transgression that one of my attorneys thought was significant. I have no doubt that Hunter would have pursued me for violation of the very privacy laws that he violated. J. Blake Hunter and those like him are minor leaguers next to Nifong but they are still cut from the same cloth. Among the list of grievances cited by Thomas Jefferson justifying our secession from The British Crown is “He has erected a multitude of New Offices, and sent hither swarms of Officers to harass our people, and eat out their substance.” Hunter and the thousands of henchmen like him are among the Officers sent by America’s governments today to harass our people and eat out their substance. What is the remedy for the people? As Jefferson also noted in The Declaration that people tend more to tolerate abuses than to correct them. But as the British saw, the breakpoint does come. We stand today at a crossroads. There are literally millions of people like J. Blake Hunter across this country, proudly inflicting their perverted senses of justice on our population. But at the very same time, we have the option of the very first presidential candidate who also espouses both a free society and the non-interventionist policy of The Founding Fathers. He is Dr. Ron Paul. This tyranny began with the federal government. Perhaps the only way to begin ending it is through the federal government with a man like Ron Paul. If not, this country is doomed.