By the way Montel Williams also exercises, takes vitamin supplements and eats very well too (lots of fresh fruits and green veggies). He doesn’t only rely on drugs to allay his pain.

Cheers!!!

If they only busted doctors who tried to rape sedated patients and that sort of thing, they’d be derelict. There ARE doctors who abuse their power and privileges in other ways, some criminally. Instead though, they’ve gone the other way and are complicit in setting doctors up with unreasonable requirements and even entrapment and outright false charges. “Usual practice” IS usual because doctors are rightly afraid to prescribe as the Medical Standard of Care says they should. The MSOC is what the textbooks, what the real experts, say to do, not the “Old Guard” doctors who were taught that opiates will take over the life of anyone who uses them as though the drug was a demon determined to destroy them. The number of pills, the amounts of opiates consumed per day by a patient, mean nothing in and of themselves, but juries are told that such things are all that count. They ignore the return of functionality, they ignore the MSOC and the science behind it. They ignore the welfare of the patients completely.

Is it legitimate to arrest a doctor who follows the MSOC and out of perhaps hundreds of patients, a couple of well-coached DEA agents or addicts manage to fool him, so they prosecute? Is it legitimate to try a doctor in the local media every time, long before he’s ever brought to trial, much less convicted? Is it legitimate, for instance, to accuse a doctor of murder because a patient of his died with opiates in his system in a car wreck – when he died as a passenger in that car? The DOJ blackmailed two, I believe, women and forced them to lie on the stand and accuse their doctor of trading sex for drugs or go to prison for all the opiates the doctor legitimately prescribed for them. When they recanted later they went to prison for it, and the conviction was upheld anyway. This is “legitimate” law? For that matter, what’s the reasoning – aside from publicity – for attacking an open clinic with DEA agents in full SWAT gear, holding patients at gunpoint, stealing their files (when the patients can’t get them back, no doctor will treat them because they have no records)?

As for clinics springing up, every time the DEA “takes down” another clinic, more doctors fire their pain patients or under-treat them so badly they MUST leave, try to find treatment that will allow them to work, or just to survive. Those patients are often forced to leave the state searching for treatment, even for ordinary problems like heart conditions, because doctors in their own states fear to give them ANYTHING, even insulin or heart meds, for fear of attracting the DEA. And of course, the DEA classifies traveling long distances to see a doctor as drug seeking behavior. And the DEA does not appear to recognize the concept of “pseudo-addictive behavior,” either.

The examples the DEA give in the piece above here are, if they are true, exceptions, and not related to the problem: doctors who are treating pain correctly being railroaded into prison! The DEA refuses to offer guidelines or to hold to the ones they did offer, so doctors never know when or how they might offend and find themselves under attack by the DEA. With all of the wrong information, if we’re being charitable, about opiates out there, of course some family member might complain about the number of pills! And they too ignore the return of function to the patient, or the deterioration after the meds are removed.

Doctors are afraid to prescribe opiates, period. The DEA can deny it all they like. The fact remains that finding correct, legitimate pain treatment in America is all but impossible! There are an estimated 70 MILLION people with chronic pain in America, almost ALL of them under-treated or untreated. And ALL of the blame can be laid at the doorstep of the DEA and the complicit enablers of the DOJ and complicit Bush era appointed federal judges. The only comfort pain patients have, and it’s a cold and useless one, is that if these soulless thugs ever manage to get old, or have a bad wreck or other accident, they will find their former “comrades” in the drug war treating them as traitors, because then and only then it seems, they finally see the light. By then, though, they’ve joined the enemy – chronic pain patients.

Ian

The government should be able to say “We don’t believe this substance is safe for human consumption, and this is why.” They should be able to say, “This company is including dangerous additives in their food, putting it into containers that leech poisons into the food, we believe they’re hiding studies that show this drug to be dangerous, and we don’t think you should consume any of it.” What they should NOT be able to do is say, “You’re just going to have to go ahead and die of your medical condition because we’re afraid that the side effects of the medication that might save your life might also make you sick or even kill you.” That is INSANE! If a patient said, ‘Well sure, this drug might save my life, but it also might make me throw up, so I won’t take it,” that patient would be judged incompetent.

So why, when the FDA or the DEA condemns people to suffering and slow death, or certain death by withholding medication, are they NOT judged incompetent? Simple answer: because of the profits and the huge amounts of almost unaccountable power to be gained. They are all out of control. The welfare of the people those agencies were created to protect is no longer their guiding principle – their own gain is. If we are to survive, and especially if we are to become something other than an expendable resource for these soulless agencies run by crony corporatists and power-hungry wannabe dictators, these agencies must be destroyed or altered, trimmed back to what they should be. Adult, competent citizens should NOT be dictated to by agencies that make their decisions independently of input from We the People, who are per the Constitution and the Declaration of Independence the sole source of all authority in America! Over many decades there has been a coup in America that was completed in the past four or five administrations that removes power from the people, placing it into the hands of corporate leaders who are so isolated from most of humanity, the “common people” are to them little more than animals, to be used and discarded when their usefulness ends. They have stated that the world would work much better if 90% of the human race were to die, and both US policy and the guiding policies of these agencies appear to working toward that goal.

At this point, we must act or die. It’s that simple, and that hard.

Ian MacLeod