In an otherwise decent article about how the federal government is using terrorism lingo and crime-fighting tools to go after pot-growers, Scott Thill throws in this line:

Unable or unwilling to solve the nation’s crippling meth addiction or its hypocritical dependency on prescribed narcotics like oxycontin, the Office of National Drug Control Policy (ONDCP) recently rang the terrorism alarm to nail pot growers in Redding’s Shasta-Trinity National Forest in California.

I appreciate Thill’s broader point, but this line is completely unnecessary. It’s also ignorant. The federal government is, frankly, going way too far in it’s efforts to fight meth and prescription painkillers. To call characterize the DEA’s railroading of doctors, it’s contempt for people suffering from chronic pain, and the stupid cold medicine registration laws as “unwilling” is really an ill-informed characterization of what the government’s been up to.

And I know it’s fun to demonize the pharmaceutical industry and all, but the phrase “hypocritical dependency,” and it’s placement next to a line about meth implies that the government is looking the other way while people get hopelessly addicted to prescription painkillers. That’s just not the case. First, as noted, the government’s going way too far in its regulation of Oxycontin, to the point of storming doctors’ offices with SWAT teams. Second, “dependence” isn’t the same as “addiction,” and to imply as much is to adopt the inaccurate and misleading rhetoric used by the DEA and ONDCP. Millions of people are “dependent” on prescription painkillers in the same way that diabetics are “dependent” on insulin–it enables them to live a normal life. There’s not a damn thing wrong with that.

Given that there are some 30 million Americans with untreated chronic pain, we need more doctors prescribing opiates, not fewer.

This entry was posted on Wednesday, August 29th, 2007 at 9:47 am by admin and is filed under Pain Treatment. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Responses are currently closed, but you can trackback from your own site.