by Admin
Can Narcotics Turn Free Speech Into Obstruction of Justice?
Sep 2, 2009
Jacob Sullum
Reason Hit & Run
“As Radley Balko and I have both noted here, Tanya Treadway, an assistant U.S. attorney in Kansas, is trying to bully pain treatment activist Siobhan Reynolds into silence by threatening to prosecute her for “obstruction of justice,” based on Reynolds’s advocacy work for a local physician accused of writing inappropriate painkiller prescriptions. In a Forbes.com column published today, civil liberties lawyer (and Reason contributor) Harvey Silverglate offers some damning details about Treadway’s harassment:
When Reynolds wrote op-eds in local newspapers and granted interviews to other media outlets, Assistant U.S. Attorney Tanya Treadway attempted to impose a gag order on her public advocacy. The district judge correctly denied this extraordinary request.
Undeterred, Treadway filed on March 27 a subpoena demanding a broad range of documents and records, obviously hoping to deter the peripatetic pain relief advocate, or even target her for a criminal trial of her own. Just what was Reynolds’ suspected criminal activity?
“Obstruction of justice” is the subpoena’s listed offense being investigated, but some of the requested records could, in no possible way, prove such a crime. The prosecutor has demanded copies of an ominous-sounding “movie,” which, in reality, is a PRN-produced documentary showing the plight of pain physicians. Also requested were records relating to a billboard Reynolds paid to have erected over a busy Wichita highway. It read: “Dr. Schneider never killed anyone.” Suddenly, a rather ordinary exercise in free speech and political activism became evidence of an obstruction of justice.
A federal judge is expected to rule tomorrow on Reynolds’ motion to block the subpoea as a violation of her First Amendment rights.”
http://www.reason.com/blog/show/135848.html
Well folks, I tried. I wrote and posted the following comment, but the site wouldn’t accept it. It just showed a completely confused address bar and wouldn’t allow previewng or posting. Can anyone else try:Here’s my post:I’ve been with PRN for a couple of years now. Just by being there, making suggestions, educating and providing moral support, we’ve saved a lot of people who came to us feeling suicidal. And then there are creatures like Treadway, supporting the DEA as it runs roughshod over all pain management in the country, and taking over the regulation of pain management from a cops standpoint: drugs+(money changing hands)=CRIME. What one single doctor does in honestly trying to practice medicine with compassion, following the Medical Standard of Care (what the textbooks, verified by medical scientific research, say to do), using opiates properly, the results can be miraculous, but they never know what will get them “investigated” (read: ‘set up’) by the DEA and imprisoned for decades. Doctors and the DEA spent a couple of years working out standards and acceptable practices with the DEA, and when they tried to use those standards to defend a doctor who had done nothing illegal but was again under attack, by the very next day the DEA had pulled those agreements and reassurances off of their web site and said, “There are a few errors in it.” That doctor is still in prison.Every time they destroy another doctor, another clinic (and to be accused is to be destroyed – ask Arthur Anderson), they leave hundreds or even thousands of patients suddenly abandoned to not just their pain and a potentially fatal withdrawal, but they are also abandoned completely to a medical community too afraid of the DEA to even treat their heart conditions, glaucoma, diabetes – If some give up and, God forbid, decide NOT to survive it all this time, plus having to start over yet again, to go beg for treatment that should be their right, lose their jobs or ability to rest, to function, to be a father, mother, a spouse, a lover again and take their own lives, that too is laid at the doctor’s doorstep for “addicting the patient to those horrible opiates”! Addiction and physical dependence are always conflated, witnesses are blackmailed, bribed and forced to lie on the stand, and even when this comes out later, the conviction is still upheld! With as many as seventy million of us out here, and yes, I’m one too, for 25 years now, they’ll let us all die of the damage caused by uncontrolled pain rather than allow us the medication we need to live again, to have a life again. They’re destroying the practice of pain management in this country, even knowing – it’s the government’s own study, after all – that the vast portion of prescription drugs on the street don’t come from pain patients or doctors. They’re routinely stolen in bulk from pharmacies, factories, shipping companies and warehouses; the DEA ignores this activity. People nailed down in poverty and unable to function and the doctors who are treating them, making very little money because these people are POOR, are so much easier as targets than real criminals. And the busts look just as good, with the help of a compliant MSM that never allows the truth into their articles or on TV, on the nightly news as DEA agents break down (open) clinic doors and handcuff a waiting room full of sick people with their faces in the waiting room carpet, guns to their heads. Hey, who knows but that one of those toddlers might haul an AK-47 out of their diapers and start blasting away. “Those “horrible drugs can do terrible things to our children, you know.” And may God help anyone who dares try to defend one of their targets – they’ll get her, too! First Amendment, Fifth Amendment, Constitution? Forget them – the DEA has the guns, and THE DOJ IS THE LAW. And we have no rights.Welcome to my world, folks. Ian MacLeodActivist PRN, Nonprofit, Nonpartisan, 501(C)(3) Corporation.Veteran, Disabled, Chronic Intractable Pain Patient, 25 yearsOathkeeper.Primum, non nocere!Illegitimis non carborundum!
HAH! It took it! Okay, anyone care to add their two cents and touch of verisimilitude?Ian