The prescription paikiller and untreated pain issue is getting lots of press play this week. USA Today is running a weeklong series (the best installment ran today), as is ABC News. Nightline will dedicate an entire episode to prescription painkillers tonight. Also, today’s Washington Examiner’s lead editorial scores a direct hit against the DEA’s “arrest the doctors” campaign.

This is all great news. The DEA’s nightmare campaign against doctors if finally getting some attention. None but the most ruthless drug warriors could look objectively at what’s going on and conclude that what the DEA’s doing is acceptable behavior from a government agency (not to mention what state and local governments are doing).

This idea that it’s better to arrest doctors (and patients) and let sick people suffer than to let recreational drug users get high off of diverted OxyContin is absurd. It’s also symptomatic of this country’s rampant phobia of pharmacology in general, and of opioids in particular. There’s a quote from a 1999 Time magazine article in a paper I’m editing that’s particularly telling. The father of a ten year-old terminal cancer patient tells the reporter he doesn’t want his son to go on morphine because he doesn’t want him to get “addicted.” Think about that. The guy would rather let his son die in agony than live with the stigma that his son died a “drug addict.” Truly awful. And a way of thinking that’s unquestionably a product of the Drug War.

I’ll have more on this later. The paper I’m editing for Cato should hit the printer soon. I’m also preparing a Fisking of the DEA. The agency bizarrely wrote a response to a column of mine for a small newspaper in York, Pennsylvania. The DEA’s response is so rife with misdirection and mistatements of fact, it’s almost laughable. Hope to have it done this week.

This entry was posted on Wednesday, May 11th, 2005 at 6:02 pm by Radley Balko and is filed under Pain Treatment. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.