April 17, 2007
Editorial
Amarillo.com
WASHINGTON - With at least 40 million Americans struggling with chronic, never-ending pain, our Washington leaders might have called on the nation's physicians to declare a war on suffering. Instead, according to a former federal prosecutor, government agents have launched a war against pain doctors and their patients.
Proponents of the war on drugs claim they are saving drug users from themselves. But drug laws have become a cover for the erosion of civil rights once protected by the U.S. Constitution.
In his new book, "Pain in America, and How Our Government Makes it Worse," John P. Flannery documents how the once respected doctor-patient relationship has been violated. The federal Drug Enforcement Administration, Flannery says, "seems to have as its objective controlling the relationship between the physician and the chronic pain patient by criminalizing the prescription of narcotics and discouraging the existence of any physician-patient relationship by which to heal the chronic pain."
The DEA routinely monitors the prescription writing habits of all American doctors. And physicians who, in good faith, prescribe large doses of legal pain killers, such as OxyContin, are often branded drug dealers and their patients, drug abusers.
Flannery's case against the DEA for trampling on the constitutionally guaranteed "zone of privacy" surrounding the doctor-patient relationship goes like this.
Exhibit 1: Manufacturing crime. Flannery tells us, "The government is not satisfied trying to detect crime, it goes out and makes it up."
How? Agents, posing as chronic pain patients, visit a physician and lie. Claiming they have a kind of chronic pain that neither surgery nor other therapies can cure, these agents give the physician no indication that the pain is not genuine. Once the doctor prescribes pain-killers, the trap is sprung.
The government, according to Flannery, holds physicians responsible for not detecting that the agents were faking it.
"When I have protested that undercover agents who are lying like this are committing a fraud on the physician and on the court afterwards," he writes, "the government says, 'But that's what the agents do.' "
Exhibit 2: Criminalizing medicine. By branding physicians who prescribe large doses of prescription pain-killing narcotics as drug dealers and their patients as drug abusers, the DEA sends shock waves through the medical community. To avoid trouble, physicians are abandoning pain care practices and cutting back on prescribing legal and effective pain control drugs. By driving pain care doctors out of business and leaving their patients-in-pain in limbo, the DEA violates the constitutional rights of patients to communicate and associate with physicians.
"You may not have considered the giving of advice or the writing of a prescription to be a First Amendment act, but it is," says Flannery.
Exhibit 3: Courting fear. Surveys show that Americans fear their own addiction through the use of prescription medicines. Because of this, Flannery writes, "The government confidently selects its juries when prosecuting physicians, or their patients, since they know they are halfway there; the jury is biased in favor of conviction for fear of becoming addicted itself."
The DEA contends it's simply trying to stop the diversion of drugs onto the black market. But in March 2004, DEA administrator Karen Tandy told Congress that her drug warriors have "… been successful in addressing OxyContin diversion as evidenced by a reduction in the rate of increase of OxyContin prescriptions being written and a leveling-off of OxyContin sales."
Wait a minute. Catching drug smugglers may be a legitimate government function; limiting the number of prescriptions written by doctors to ease pain is certainly not.
In fact, in 2005, the attorneys general in 30 states sent the DEA a letter in which they complained that because its agents were confusing and scaring doctors, patients were not getting the proper pain relief they needed.
Why are Americans in pain not up in arms over the government's treatment of pain doctors?
Many remain silent, and learn to live with pain, because they fear the DEA will turn on them also, as drug abusers. For the same reason, patients are quick to cooperate with the DEA against their doctors.
This silence may be rooted also in the fact that, for most Americans, the DEA's actions against pain doctors only confirm their cynical view of government.
When asked, "How much of the time do you think you can trust the government in Washington to do what is right?" nearly 70 percent respond "never" or "some of the time."
Ronald Fraser writes on public policy issues for the DKT Liberty Project, a Washington-based civil liberties organization. He can be reached at fraserr@erols.com.
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