Monday, August 1st, 2005
DEA Administrator Karen Tandy responded to John Tierney’s column on prescription painkillers with the agency’s usual mix of misinformation and selective statistics. Tandy writes:
To the Editor:
John Tierney (column, July 23) suggests that the Drug Enforcement Administration has a “new strategy” that takes aim at legitimate physicians.
This is not the case.
Our fight against drugs has produced important results. Youth drug use has dropped by 17 percent over three years. The D.E.A. has increased its fight against the diversion of legal drugs to combat growing prescription drug abuse, evidenced by the fact that almost one out of every 10 high school seniors has abused prescription drugs.
Doctors are a small part of the problem, with the D.E.A. investigating less than 0.1 percent of doctors last year and prosecuting only 12 of the more than 600,000 registered doctors.
The doctors we investigate and prosecute commit criminal acts like writing fraudulent prescriptions to support their own substance abuse, exchanging prescriptions for sexual favors or monetary kickbacks, or gross overprescribing that results in grave harm to patients.
Mr. Tierney doesn’t mention those doctors, whom the D.E.A. must prevent from doing harm. It is incorrect to suggest the D.E.A.’s motives involve anything other than its responsibility to protect the public.
Karen P. Tandy
Administrator
Drug Enforcement Administration
Arlington, Va., July 26, 2005
Many of these claims also appeared in Tandy’s response to an op-ed I wrote a few months ago. I addressed her response line-by-line here.
As for the rest:
The “1 in 10 high schoolers abuse prescription drugs” line comes from a study by the ever-alarmist anti-drug group CASA. Even the ONDCP acknowledged that CASA’s study probably exaggerated the extent of prescription drug abuse.
When Tandy writes that the agency has investigated less than .1 percent of DEA-licensed doctors, she’s refering to all doctors licensed to dispense some sort of controlled medication. The number of doctors who treat pain is much smaller. The number willing to treat pain with high-dose opioid therapy is even smaller. Every investigation and/or arrest of a doctor most certainly casts a chill over those still willing to treat pain this way. If these investigations truly had no effect on pain care, there wouldn’t be tens of thousands of pain patients desperately seeking someone to treat them.
Tandy’s “12 doctors prosecuted” figure is also startlingly low. I’m not sure if this is the number of docturs actually put on trial (subtracting those who plead), or if it’s some other figure strategically defined to arrive at a low total. But the DEA itself says it arrested 42 doctors in 2004. And that’s just the DEA. Dozens more have been arrested at the state and local level with assistance from the feds. And again, the agency has investigated over 5,000 doctors in the last six years. An investigation alone is enough to put a doctor out of business.
As for the eye-opening claims that doctors were getting kickbacks and sex in exchange for drugs, I again challenge Tandy to name the doctors she’s talking about. Thus far, the federal government has only been able to secure convictions on doctors for the charge of being “duped” by crafty dealers posing as pain patients. The only doctor convicted of a “sex for drugs” scheme that I know of was that of Dr. B.L. Rottschaefer. And from what I’ve read of the case since his conviction, it’s looking more and more like the feds set him up by dropping charges against prostitutes and pushers in exchange for testimony.
This entry was posted
on Monday, August 1st, 2005 at 11:38 am 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.
TheAgitator.com
