Drug Wars - Drug Control

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Drug Control? No, Citizen Control By Siobhan Reynolds

04/20/2009

Siobhan Reynolds, head of the Pain Relief Network and widow of a chronic pain patient, is working against the US Government's campaign against pain patients and the physicians who treat them. She is also the author of an upcoming book about her experiences in a groundbreaking case currently taking place in Wichita, Kansas. The book, No Kansas To Come Home To, is expected to be published this fall.

We keep hearing about how the War on Drugs has failed. But the truth is, the War on Drugs has been tremendously successful, that is if you wanted your country to be a police state, your Congress completely unresponsive to the needs of the people, and your doctors letting you and your loved ones live and die in unnecessary pain. The marijuana activists have made a lot of progress toward marijuana legalization and overall, that is a positive development. What isn't positive is that they have done so, at least in part, by covering up the crackdown on medical pain management that has been going on full tilt since 2001. Veterans, cancer patients, people who have been unfortunate in any number of ways (and I am talking here about millions of Americans) have been unable to get pain medications that are supposed to be legal, but which, in reality, are only "semi-legal" -- drugs whose legality can be withdrawn by law enforcement whenever the DEA decides that this or that doctor isn't controlling his patients sufficiently. This has meant that while no one was looking, our most vulnerable citizens, those in crushing chronic pain, have been denied pain care and allowed to die abandoned by us all. The Controlled Substances Act makes it a crime to buy or sell controlled substances except as authorized by the Attorney General of the United States. When the act was passed in the early 1970's doctors were told that possession of a medical license and the issuance of a DEA certificate would automatically exempt them from prosecution -- in other words, if a doctor was acting as a doctor, he or she would be safe. Shortly thereafter the Department of Justice included some language in the Code of Federal Regulations that changed the terms of the deal. A doctor had to write such prescriptions not only in "the course of professional practice" but with a "legitimate medical purpose." Now the coast was clear for the USDOJ to criminalize any physician whose practice of pain medicine didn't meet with a single prosecutor's notions of how medicine ought to be practiced. When then Attorney General John Ashcroft went into the state of Oregon and attempted to defeat the state's assisted suicide law by declaring the practice of assisted suicide "illegitimate," the ruse was exposed. It was US government attorneys themselves who in court documents acknowledged

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that they had been prosecuting pain treating physicians on what amounted to medical disagreements. District Judge Jones scolded the government and later the United States Supreme Court forcefully clarified that the act only criminalized physician conduct that was drug dealing as "conventionally understood." But the Feds were undeterred. In direct defiance of the Supreme Court, the Department of Justice continued its crackdown on medical pain management, prosecuting some 400 physicians since 2003. Many of these doctors are serving decades -- long prison sentences, having been found guilty of writing "illegitimate prescriptions" by lay juries. How does a jury come to conclude that a prescription was illegitimate? Patients looking for reductions in their sentences testify that they exaggerated their pain to the doctor, and, too, the government brings in one of several hired gun "expert witnesses" to testify that the doctor "should have known" the patients were abusing the medications, based on the presence of certain "red flags" that the "expert" says should have been a clear warning to the doctor that the patient should have been cut off his medications. Sound to you like witch trials? That is exactly what they are. Recently, the FDA got into the act and withdrew some 13 pain medicines from the market. Those few patients who had been getting by were now told by pharmacists that they would not be able to fill their prescriptions. Shockingly, academic medicine, funded by government grants, has nothing to say in the face of these outrages. Moreover, the mainstream press such as the New York Times and the Associated Press continue to trumpet the government's press strategy -- portraying actions taken against sick people as responsive to an utterly undemonstrated "health crisis" of prescription drug overdoses. Time and again, stories about what's actually happening to the patients are buried by editors. The political consequences of this latest crackdown are almost as grim. The Federal government has managed to completely subvert the regulation of medicine in the states, as concerns the management of pain, turning medical boards into kangaroo courts where doctors who mistakenly thought their job was to heal the sick and relieve suffering, get their medical licenses summarily taken away on the DEA's say so. Patients are afraid to speak out, lest they lose the medicine that keeps them working. Physicians are counseled by white collar attorneys to put their heads down and take a plea deal. And all of us are being registered with pharmacy computers so that those who take any controlled substances -or in the latest insanity, even cold medicines -- are being monitored by the government. And the abuses proliferate. The War on Terror was not the first overblown fear campaign that was used to destroy our liberties. The War on Drugs and the nearly one hundred year old Federal campaign against us all, called "drug prohibition," pioneered the tactics that many people now view as transparently authoritarian. Once you come to understand that "drug control" was never intended to control drugs, but rather to create a pretext for the Federal control of citizens, you come to see that the "War's" goals have been met. . . and then some.

Copyright © 2009 Campaign for Liberty

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