The proponents of marijuana legalization (to the exclusion of opioid legalization) use the "evil" pharmaceutical opioids and their imaginary "terrible side effects" as a whipping boy in their PR campaign for the relaxation of marijuana laws...
Interestingly, and sadly, Angel Raich (of Raich vs Gonzalas fame) has been writing as of late that her brain tumors have been causing her terrible pain and that marijuana has not been helping.
People who understand the science of pain treatment could explian why this is the case-that is if any marijuana advocate were interested in the answer.
We would explain that opioids are chemically identical to the endorphins in our spinal cords that the body naturally produces to mitigate pain. That's why opioids work for the treatment of pain, and why marijuana, while helpful in many regards for both the sick and well, doesn't work as a serious pain medicine for most types of pain.
It would be nice if the marijuana activists would stop and think for a moment that if marijuana had been taken over by the pharmaceutical and medical industry instead of having been left out of the medical world entirely, these same activists would now think that marijuana was evil too. It is merely an accident of history that opioids have been medicalized. In fact, around the world indigenous peoples use the juice from the opium poppy for pain relief in teas, and as a paste that is smoked-just like marijuana.
And since chronic pain is a progressive neurological disease when left untreated by opioids, it is entirely conceivable that the pain crisis in America results from our cultural adoption of opioids into the medical pharmacopoeia. Because doctors have been controlled by law enforcement for nearly a hundred years, the millions of people with pain who might have been able to stop their progressive disease early on with some opium tea, are instead told by trusted physicians that there is "nothing that can be done."
So much confusion surrounds the treatment of pain with opioids, confusion that is perpetuated by physicians who have been conditioned by the very understandable fear they feel when they consider prescribing pharmaceutical opioids; the fear of getting arrested by all levels of law enforcement. That's the medical profession's excuse.
One wonders what the marijuana activists' excuse will be for continuing to fear monger for the Feds.
Friday, August 28, 2009
Tuesday, August 25, 2009
Your Medical Profession In the Drug War
I got an email last night that made me sick. I get a lot that make me sick, people thrown out of care, people begging me to find them help, people who lose their children, jobs, anything of value to them, because someone decided to take advantage of their degraded social status as a pain patient, called them an addict, and then went to town.
But this email was different.
It was from a man who lives with cancer and ALS. A man who has remained brave and gentle despite the ravages disease has taken on his body and spirit.
Ever since his hospice doctor was replaced with an addictionologist, he has been tortured by this so called doctor, his care threatened at every turn.
What most people don't understand is that under drug prohibition, a whole sub-class of compromised medical professionals has been subsidized by the government-a sub-class of doctors who have been busted for drug abuse or sexual abuse of patients and who have "seen the light" i.e. have agreed to become a kind of doctor/snitch on a permanent basis for the government. The busting and re-education of these doctor/snitches is in fact big business, for if a doctor is caught suffering a drinking problem or taking drugs at all, the medical board that licenses him will send him to a "treatment facility" that can cost 30k per month, so that he can be "cured" and henceforth made available to snitch on other doctors. Of course most of the docs being done this way, don't turn into snitches, they pay their money, do their twelve-steps, and go back to the noble art and science of practicing medicine. But some take to the self-mythologizing perks of addictionology and henceforth groove on being "in recovery." And its they who the DEA and Medical boards recruit to "advocate" for substance abusing docs.
As a result of a backroom deal cut between big pharma, academic medicine and the FDA (fronting for DEA) these doctor/snitches have been put in charge of providing hospice care to our nation's dying. That's right...they tweeze the dying for pain medications. They work to get the dying off of pain meds so their bosses wont pull their medical licenses.
Feeling sick yet?
The FDA's name for this new course of drug control is called REMS (short for Risk Evaluation Management Strategy) and it appears to be consistent with a plan pushed by the top academic docs for at least the last 15 years; give up the patients to law enforcement, the addictionologists can be employed to look for signs of addiction in those who require strong pain meds, and the rest of us are off the hook.
The idea is to remove most Schedule 3 meds like Vicodin and Percocet from the pharmacies and then put addictionologists in charge of prescribing all that remains...the Schedule 2's (The ostensible hard drugs).
The term madness doesn't cover this...what we are looking at is ongoing abuse of the sick and dying by government doctors. Government snitch/doctors...
This is your medical profession in the drug war.
But this email was different.
It was from a man who lives with cancer and ALS. A man who has remained brave and gentle despite the ravages disease has taken on his body and spirit.
Ever since his hospice doctor was replaced with an addictionologist, he has been tortured by this so called doctor, his care threatened at every turn.
What most people don't understand is that under drug prohibition, a whole sub-class of compromised medical professionals has been subsidized by the government-a sub-class of doctors who have been busted for drug abuse or sexual abuse of patients and who have "seen the light" i.e. have agreed to become a kind of doctor/snitch on a permanent basis for the government. The busting and re-education of these doctor/snitches is in fact big business, for if a doctor is caught suffering a drinking problem or taking drugs at all, the medical board that licenses him will send him to a "treatment facility" that can cost 30k per month, so that he can be "cured" and henceforth made available to snitch on other doctors. Of course most of the docs being done this way, don't turn into snitches, they pay their money, do their twelve-steps, and go back to the noble art and science of practicing medicine. But some take to the self-mythologizing perks of addictionology and henceforth groove on being "in recovery." And its they who the DEA and Medical boards recruit to "advocate" for substance abusing docs.
As a result of a backroom deal cut between big pharma, academic medicine and the FDA (fronting for DEA) these doctor/snitches have been put in charge of providing hospice care to our nation's dying. That's right...they tweeze the dying for pain medications. They work to get the dying off of pain meds so their bosses wont pull their medical licenses.
Feeling sick yet?
The FDA's name for this new course of drug control is called REMS (short for Risk Evaluation Management Strategy) and it appears to be consistent with a plan pushed by the top academic docs for at least the last 15 years; give up the patients to law enforcement, the addictionologists can be employed to look for signs of addiction in those who require strong pain meds, and the rest of us are off the hook.
The idea is to remove most Schedule 3 meds like Vicodin and Percocet from the pharmacies and then put addictionologists in charge of prescribing all that remains...the Schedule 2's (The ostensible hard drugs).
The term madness doesn't cover this...what we are looking at is ongoing abuse of the sick and dying by government doctors. Government snitch/doctors...
This is your medical profession in the drug war.
Monday, August 10, 2009
Torturing Terrorists Symptom of Widespread Ethical Breakdown in US Medicine
Naomi Wolf, on her Facebook notes page, has reported that a growing outcry has developed over physician and psychologist complicity in the torture of the captives of Guantanamo.
The AMA, according to Mother Jones reporter Justine Sharrock in the magazine's August edition, has been entirely silent on the issue-refusing to even look into allegations that American medical professionals have themselves become torturers of helpless detainees.
None of this is surprising to the throngs of Americans in chronic pain, struggling to survive in the relative freedom of the mainland US. For under a century long regime of opioid prohibition, the medical profession has become inured to the wails and cries of those in chronic pain who come under their putative care.
To American doctors and to doctors all over the world, in fact, the millions who come to them for help with chronic pain are "addicts"-people officially and societally designated as beneath contempt; people, not unlike "terrorists" who, it is apparently A.O.K., and even morally correct to abuse and neglect. So it is unsurprising that the destruction of medical ethics that has occurred under the War On Drugs would rear its ugly head on an island off the coast of the US in our War On Terror, where other helpless and hated captives are routinely abused by American medical personnel under color of US authority.
*Description of Prison studies courtesy of Wikipedia
The AMA, according to Mother Jones reporter Justine Sharrock in the magazine's August edition, has been entirely silent on the issue-refusing to even look into allegations that American medical professionals have themselves become torturers of helpless detainees.
None of this is surprising to the throngs of Americans in chronic pain, struggling to survive in the relative freedom of the mainland US. For under a century long regime of opioid prohibition, the medical profession has become inured to the wails and cries of those in chronic pain who come under their putative care.
To American doctors and to doctors all over the world, in fact, the millions who come to them for help with chronic pain are "addicts"-people officially and societally designated as beneath contempt; people, not unlike "terrorists" who, it is apparently A.O.K., and even morally correct to abuse and neglect. So it is unsurprising that the destruction of medical ethics that has occurred under the War On Drugs would rear its ugly head on an island off the coast of the US in our War On Terror, where other helpless and hated captives are routinely abused by American medical personnel under color of US authority.
A now famous Stanford Prison experiment was conducted in 1971 by a team of researchers led by Psychology Professor Philip Zimbardo at Stanford University. Twenty-four undergraduates were selected out of 70 to play the roles of both guards and prisoners and live in a mock prison in the basement of the Stanford psychology building. Those selected were chosen for their lack of psychological issues, crime history, and medical disabilities, in order to obtain a representative sample. Roles were assigned based on a coin toss.
Prisoners and guards rapidly adapted to their roles, stepping beyond the boundaries of what had been predicted and leading to dangerous and psychologically damaging situations. One-third of the guards were judged to have exhibited "genuine" sadistic tendencies, while many prisoners were emotionally traumatized and two had to be removed from the experiment early.
After being confronted by Christina Maslach, a graduate student in psychology whom he was dating, and realizing that he had been passively allowing unethical acts to be performed under his direct supervision, Zimbardo concluded that both prisoners and guards had become too grossly absorbed in their roles and terminated the experiment after six days.
Ethical concerns surrounding the experiment often draw comparisons to the Milgram experiment, which was conducted in 1961 at Yale University by Stanley Milgram, Zimbardo's former college friend. Tom Peters and Robert H. Waterman Jr wrote in 1981 that the Milgram experiment and the Stanford prison experiment were frightening in their implications about the danger which lurks in the darker side of human nature.
The few doctors in the US willing to treat pain and thereby brave Federal criminal prosecution and the possibility of decades long prison sentences and personal ruin, apparently believe that they have somehow transcended this darker side of human nature and therefore do not see the need to engage in any meaningful examination of the millions of complaints of patients who report they are degraded, talked down to, medically neglected and routinely medically abandoned. And the AMA, not surprisingly, has turned a deaf ear to the patient's desperate cries, as well.
In a groundbreaking academic article called the Pitfalls of Pain Management that appeared in Practical Pain Management in 2005, the authors manage to carefully review the relevant Milgram and Zimbardo studies in the context of pain treatment under US Department of Justice supervision, but never manage to send out the SOS that patient abuse is actually occurring.
"psychologists are being recruited by Independent Medical Examiners (IME) panels to detect deception and malingering rather than focusing on assisting patients in finding the most appropriate focus for care.....These pain patients feel that medical appointments are more like interrogation sessions where they are under investigation and are dictated to about how to live and function rather than being 'listened to.'"
No alarm bells here, because the realities of having to operate within the context of a system that demands doctors separate out the worthy from the unworthy based on criteria set up by law enforcement, blinds even these otherwise insightful authors to the implications of their own observations.
Even Steven H. Miles, a bioethicist at the University of Minnesota Medical School, who is leading the clarion outcry about both the abuse of prisoners in Guantanamo and the AMA's silence in the face of what is clearly a serious breakdown in medical ethics under military direction, declined to send out a "call to arms" when the US turned its Drug War apparatus on domestic medical practice in the years following 9-11, telling me, as the head of the Pain Relief Network, "that's (doctors abusing patients in pain) been a problem for a long time," this, as he promptly terminated our discussion-as if the ongoing degradation of ethical standards and the resulting destruction of innocent human life is somehow less troubling than an acute episode such as we are now confronting at Guantanamo.
What the silence of Miles and of the AMA reveals is that the abusive behavior of American medical personnel did not spontaneously erupt during the War On Terror but had already become widely accepted in the circles of medical practitioners and ethicists over the course of the last nearly one hundred years of drug prohibition as concerns the non-treatment of pain.
So while Mother Jones' August '09 issue is dedicated to unearthing and examining the truly harrowing realities of death squads roaming Mexico and cartels operating, at last count, in some 250 American cities, while simultaneously covering the AMA's silence on doctor complicity in torture, the editors fail to make the connection between the prohibition of "hard drugs" i.e. pain medication, and the destruction of American standards for ethical medicine. The magazine's recommendation, it appears, is to decriminalize or legalize marijuana-a measure, that certainly needs doing, but which would have no curative effect on the more pernicious problem of the destruction of medical ethics under prohibition of "hard drugs," and the now widespread institutional acceptance of this ongoing, yet nevertheless, shocking state of affairs.
*Description of Prison studies courtesy of Wikipedia
Thursday, August 6, 2009
American Pain In The Drug War: The Hidden Genocide
When we think of genocide, we ordinarily think of mass killings, perpetrated by governments, mass killings of particular populations made up of people of a given ethnic minority, religious group, or political sub-group. We don't usually think of ordinary Americans of all backgrounds, of all stripes. We don't usually think of our vets, or our children with cancer, or our moms and dads.
Well, think again.
What is perhaps our country's dirtiest secret of all, is the quiet, almost undetectable ongoing genocide of people in extreme pain-their lives ended slowly by a perfect storm of economic and political interests that come together to enrich whole segments of our elite economy-but which feeds off the slow destruction of people who could otherwise be saved by the application of traditional opioid pain relief.
By all estimates-and this includes government estimates-50 million Americans live in chronic untreated pain. Forced to wheedle and beg doctors to help them, sold ineffective and downright dangerous pharmaceutical meds by big pharma....these people's insurance coverage, their families' resources, and finally their very physical substance is sucked dry as they struggle to find actual pain relief in a country-hell, in a world-that has, for many reasons, banned the only medicine that works-that's right-I'm talking about "junk", the stuff that "addicts" you..the evil, demon- ridden opioid molecule.
Astonishingly, the earth has provided the poppy, a beautiful flowering plant, whose extract contains the very same chemical compounds our bodies themselves manufacture so we can deal with normal painful moments, i.e. the stubbed toe, the bad patch at the dentist..even childbirth..
The earth has provided it in the poppy plant for those instances in which our bodies' natural resource of opium has been overtaxed-either because the pain is too great and the body cannot meet the demand for relief-or, when the pain is so ongoing and extreme that the body cannot turn the pain off and keep it turned off...
That is what the miracle of opium affords us...but look what we have done with this extraordinary revelation, this bona fide evidence of God's love. We have demonized it and turned it into an agent of evil...we have made a kind of inviolable social pact with each other and our political elite, that this flower's extract deposits evil in those who would avail themselves of its healing properties..
Can the use of this heaven sent medicine cause some people problems? Of course...
But what do you know about, what cure cannot also sometimes prove to be worse than the disease?
The deaths of Michael Jackson, Janis Joplin, Jimi Hendrix and many many others capture the popular imagination...and so we tremble and sort of thrill to the dark possibilities that "beckon us" from the evil opium.
But we do not see the millions of Americans in pain-end of life pain, cancer pain, chronic pain from back injuries or joint disorders-the causes are endless-people who cannot get the only medicine that works to stop the searing agony.
The millions of Americans in pain are people our courts, law enforcement and the mindless media have labeled addicts-that is if these people in pain are ever lucky enough to become dependent on the one medicine that will allow them to move on with their lives...
The rest are doomed to physical failure and unnecessary destruction due to the strain of untreated pain...
And what do we hear of this slaughter? Nothing..
Where are the newstories about the Americans crushed by the thousands every time the DEA "takes down" a doctor's practice?
Shhhhhhhh.
We might come to think a lot less of ourselves if we came to realize what we were all doing to keep this whole thing hushed up...
Shhhhhhh.
We might even end the Drug War....
Well, think again.
What is perhaps our country's dirtiest secret of all, is the quiet, almost undetectable ongoing genocide of people in extreme pain-their lives ended slowly by a perfect storm of economic and political interests that come together to enrich whole segments of our elite economy-but which feeds off the slow destruction of people who could otherwise be saved by the application of traditional opioid pain relief.
By all estimates-and this includes government estimates-50 million Americans live in chronic untreated pain. Forced to wheedle and beg doctors to help them, sold ineffective and downright dangerous pharmaceutical meds by big pharma....these people's insurance coverage, their families' resources, and finally their very physical substance is sucked dry as they struggle to find actual pain relief in a country-hell, in a world-that has, for many reasons, banned the only medicine that works-that's right-I'm talking about "junk", the stuff that "addicts" you..the evil, demon- ridden opioid molecule.
Astonishingly, the earth has provided the poppy, a beautiful flowering plant, whose extract contains the very same chemical compounds our bodies themselves manufacture so we can deal with normal painful moments, i.e. the stubbed toe, the bad patch at the dentist..even childbirth..
The earth has provided it in the poppy plant for those instances in which our bodies' natural resource of opium has been overtaxed-either because the pain is too great and the body cannot meet the demand for relief-or, when the pain is so ongoing and extreme that the body cannot turn the pain off and keep it turned off...
That is what the miracle of opium affords us...but look what we have done with this extraordinary revelation, this bona fide evidence of God's love. We have demonized it and turned it into an agent of evil...we have made a kind of inviolable social pact with each other and our political elite, that this flower's extract deposits evil in those who would avail themselves of its healing properties..
Can the use of this heaven sent medicine cause some people problems? Of course...
But what do you know about, what cure cannot also sometimes prove to be worse than the disease?
The deaths of Michael Jackson, Janis Joplin, Jimi Hendrix and many many others capture the popular imagination...and so we tremble and sort of thrill to the dark possibilities that "beckon us" from the evil opium.
But we do not see the millions of Americans in pain-end of life pain, cancer pain, chronic pain from back injuries or joint disorders-the causes are endless-people who cannot get the only medicine that works to stop the searing agony.
The millions of Americans in pain are people our courts, law enforcement and the mindless media have labeled addicts-that is if these people in pain are ever lucky enough to become dependent on the one medicine that will allow them to move on with their lives...
The rest are doomed to physical failure and unnecessary destruction due to the strain of untreated pain...
And what do we hear of this slaughter? Nothing..
Where are the newstories about the Americans crushed by the thousands every time the DEA "takes down" a doctor's practice?
Shhhhhhhh.
We might come to think a lot less of ourselves if we came to realize what we were all doing to keep this whole thing hushed up...
Shhhhhhh.
We might even end the Drug War....
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