Jan 1, 2001 Author Unknown Painreliefnetwork.org

Not realizing that pain care had been actively discouraged by the Federal government since the dawn of prohibition, well meaning medical professionals, beginning in the 1980’s, did clinical research and produced volumes of life-saving findings that should have dispelled any lingering fear about the risks to patients and to the public’s health previously associated with treating pain with opioids. In the normal course of events, absent the Federal government’s active but unacknowledged opposition to available pain care, these breakthroughs would have meant that patients in severe pain would now be enabled to lead relatively normal lives.

A few pioneering doctors treated these patients according to the dictates of the latest science, and with excellent results. Lives have been saved, families restored, and years of agony ended. Unfortunately, the Federal Government has responded to these developments with a series of brutal attacks aimed at these groundbreaking doctors personally, and at the practice of effective pain care in general; legitimate physicians who treat pain are being systematically intimidated and criminally prosecuted and news of such prosecutions is serving to further frighten the few remaining physicians who dare to treat pain.

Across America, people develop serious illness as a result of untreated pain that would not occur if the medical community were genuinely free to treat pain appropriately. Because doses of pain medication are held artificially low due to physician’s fear of criminal prosecution and ruination, Americans in pain are being denied critical, life-saving medical care.

Hard as it is to believe, families and friends of Americans in severe pain are forced to stand by helplessly and watch as their family members deteriorate unnecessarily. The suffering and sense of isolation is unbearable for all.

This results in silent disaster for the patient, his or her family, and the community at large.

The added medical costs alone, which are of course borne by us all, are estimated at several hundred billion dollars per year.

Hope and health has been cruelly snatched from those citizens who had finally found relief. Many have been forced back to a life of painful disability, and many have committed suicide.

By empowering the DEA, thereby the Department of Justice, to authorize physicians to prescribe controlled substances, the Congress inadvertently created a climate of perpetual investigation, thereby giving the DEA unprecedented control over the medical decision making of physicians.