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Friday, Jul 10, 2009
Readers respond to Damien Cave on the DEA's control of pain medication and to a mother lode of anger.
Apr 11, 2002 | Read "No Relief" by Damien Cave
I retired in December 1995 as a senior forensic chemist with the Drug Enforcement Administration. Since then my father has died of lung cancer, begging my mother to get his pistol to end his terminal pain. I have seen the DEA grow from a reasonable "will of the people" agency in the early 1970s to an out-of-control right-wing bunch of nuts today, who deny pain control for terminal patients in the name of "anti-drug policy."
DEA is totally out of bounds today in its ideological battle to control all drugs for any use. It must be constrained to reasonable bounds, yet any politician who opposes its narrow restrictions is labeled "soft on drugs." It seems to me that the problem is one of semantics. This labeling is the major problem in getting reasonable restrictions on drugs vs. the unreasonable ones in place today.
This in a country that has a "drugstore" on every corner. Double-think has arrived. Reasonable restrictions should be placed on DEA regarding patients who need pain medicine. I think such restrictions should be placed on marijuana in federal law, but federal law should respect state laws that supersede federal laws aka states' rights: States like California should be free of raids by federal criminals, who ignore the restrictions placed upon them by the Constitution. I will still travel to the Netherlands whenever I want to indulge in a bit of hash, as I did in 2000 and 2001. Try the Blueberry hash at the Bushdoctor.
-- Josef D. Prall
As a caseworker at a methadone clinic for almost seven years, I have firsthand experience dealing with the hypocrisy of the government regarding drug addiction and pain-killing drugs. What exactly are we afraid of -- that a few addicts will get over on us? Three hundred deaths resulting from the abuse of OxyContin in a two-year period? How many deaths could easily be attributed to the legal use of alcohol over that same period of time? How many lives would be saved by legalizing needle exchanges over that two-year period? How many addicts could avail themselves of treatment if some of the money we're spending on the failed policy of interdiction would be diverted in that direction? I have never heard an addict say, "Man, I can't find any dope." Virtually all of my clients come here for the treatment of opioid dependence. Many of them, I am sure, are also here for the side benefit, treatment of chronic pain.
-- Lance Lein
I read Damien Cave's article about OxyContin and came away with one big question: Where is the doctors' outrage? While doctors avoid the DEA and divert patients to overwhelmed pain specialists, why aren't they pissed off that they are being discouraged from adequately treating patients? There seems to be a lot of outcry among pain management advocates (not sure how many are M.D.s) and, of course, the patients themselves. But judging from the article, M.D.s are more resigned to the gloomy reality than fired up to change it.
-- Christine Owens
Mr. Cave, thanks so much for taking the time and having the compassion to write your wonderful piece "No Relief." It's time that we as a civilization move forward, like Holland, like Switzerland, like Portugal, like Scotland, the U.K. and many other great countries and free societies. We must become progressive and let grown adults have jurisdiction over what enters their own bodies. America is supposed to be the land of the free. It is obscene that the U.S. has now become an oppressive nanny state dictating how much pain medicine a suffering person can have. These issues are nobody's business aside from doctor, patient and family.
Regrettably, we have a right-wing administration, and the irony is that they are always the ones talking about how they want to take government out of the people's personal lives, proving once again what puritanical, hypocritical liars they really are. The very idea that an AIDS patient can be sent to prison for growing a plant in his garden that helps him keep his medicine down, or eases his pain, is tragic. The thought of compassionate doctors being harassed by corrupt DEA thugs for doing their job and giving patients what they need for pain is simply not acceptable in any free society. The War on Drugs is nothing more than a War on the American People.
-- Holly Day
