Pain Relief Network

Pain Relief Network was founded in 2002 in response to the Bush Administration's crackdown on pain treating physicians. The Department of Justice launched its "Oxycontin Action Plan" in response to a DEA press campaign that asserted that Purdue Pharmaceuticals had unleashed an "epidemic" of drug abuse across the country, particularly in rural Appalachia. (The DEA’s OxyContin Action Plan: An Unproven Drug Epidemic)

Much like previous drug panics, stretching back to alcohol prohibition, (Agency of Fear: Opiates and Political Power in America) the Federal Government sought to frighten the public into giving up its power and much of its medical privacy to the Federal police apparatus. Because this drug panic coincided with the launching of the Bush Administration's war in the Middle East, the campaign was highly successful…at least at the beginning.

Doctors who treated chronic or intractable pain with opioid pain medications were literally rounded up and put on trial, the government demanding that they serve decades, sometimes hundreds of years in prison. Medical professionals not yet targeted, responded by fleeing the discipline of pain management in droves and the leaders of academic medicine who had been duped by the DEA and the DOJ groveled to make ever more demeaning concessions to the rampaging Federal police.

Clinics across America became tertiary medical facilities of the federal apparatus, essentially operating at the whim of DEA. Patients have been made virtual prisoners of the doctors who treat their pain subject to capricious and abusive  care (Doctors as Captors) and no longer enjoy medical privacy or dignity. Behind the scenes, and sometimes out front, PRN represented the solitary organized response to this onslaught. We worked with private attorneys, responsive academics, abandoned pain patients, and other advocacy groups, to accomplish three things:

First, to come to understand the legal and procedural mechanisms that resulted in certain conviction. Second, to alert the media as to what was going on and third, to help, as much as possible, with our limited resources, the private attorneys who became involved in these overwhelming cases. We were unable to hire our own attorneys due to a lack of funding.

On July 12, 2007 Siobhan Reynolds, the president and founder of PRN, herself the family member of a now deceased chronic pain patient, and John Flannery, one of the private attorneys with whom PRN had worked on several cases in the past, testified before the House Subcommittee on Crime (Read Testimony). The hearing was covered by John Tierney in his blog on the New York Times website and much was accomplished to put the documentary proof of this government sponsored holocaust on the Congressional Record.

As a result, we are working with several members of the Subcommittee to introduce legislation to return the regulation of medicine to the Fifty States where, according to the US Supreme Court, it rightfully belongs.

We are also working to educate the media and members of Congress as to the severity of the problem should political will somehow magically develop out of the swirling chaos that now characterizes Capitol Hill, informing members and their staff of the substantive press coverage PRN developed on our issue (When Is a Pain Doctor a Drug Pusher?) and the damage being done to their constituents.

However, PRN will no longer be working with individual doctors and their attorneys (except in already established relationships) and does not seek to take on new cases.

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The Controlled Substances Act is fundamentally unlawful in that it deprives doctors and patients of their Constitutional rights.  PRN would like to bring sanity, reason and compassion to this urgent debate, we need your help to do it.