Thanks to the latest twist in the endless War on Drugs, new laws are ensuring that patients in chronic pain will be denied pain killers. So they are left to writhe in pain, because doctors are afraid to help.
Charles Passantino stared at his doctor in disbelief.
A 64-year-old patient with a crippling liver disease, Passantino had received treatment for eight years for chronic pain. He took small doses of oxycodone, a generic painkiller, to free his muscles from stiffness and swelling.
With the pills, he got by. Without them, just walking from bedroom to living room proved unbearable.
Now, with little explanation and no warning, he was being dumped.
In March, Passantino’s doctor told him that his Pierce County clinic, part of the Community Health Care network, was no longer treating chronic-pain patients. The doctor wrote one last oxycodone prescription — 25 pills, 5 milligrams each, good for maybe a week — and suggested that Passantino cut the tablets into pieces, to make them last longer.
Good luck finding another doctor, the physician said.
So much for the Hippocratic Oath I guess. He could find no one to treat him, and his wife called every possible doctor or clinic as well as the American Pain Foundation. She even contacted the governor. Eventually, the man was offered Methadone, which is more dangerous than oxycodone, but cheaper. The irony is that his pain had been adequately managed for years with small doses of oxycodone. Finally, the American Pain Foundation made him into a cause, and the lobbyist approach eventually persuaded one daring clinic to treat him:
Passantino’s quest for care became a crusade for Elin Bjorling, who oversees the Washington office of the American Pain Foundation, a nonprofit group that serves as an advocate for patients.
This fall, Bjorling released a survey that found dozens of health clinics have adopted new policies refusing to treat chronic-pain patients.
“This is a crisis that is causing widespread and needless suffering,” she says.
In Passantino’s case, Bjorling canvassed dozens of doctors and marshaled her organization’s forces to alert the Governor’s Office and lawmakers to Passantino’s situation. In September, she broke through: A University of Washington clinic agreed to examine Passantino.
“They took a look at me and saw a responsible patient who had taken small doses of pain pills — no more than what they give infants — for more than eight years without problems,” Passantino says.
The clinic agreed to treat Passantino — and put him back on oxycodone, six months after he’d been cut off.
Once more, with each dose, Passantino is temporarily freed from pain. He enjoys short walks with his wife along their tree-lined neighborhood.
Treating pain goes to the essence of what medicine is all about. It should not require intervention from the governor or a massive lobbying effort to get a doctor to simply do his job.
In order to keep lying addicts from getting their damned drugs, is the above sort of scenario really what society wants? Apparently it is. Try as I might, I simply cannot understand the brutal mentality behind making people in pain suffer. It strikes me as a perverse sort of neo-puritanism run amok, maybe even a poorly understood instinctive form of cruelty directed at the weak or vulnerable. (On an animal level, some people actually enjoy the suffering of others, which is why many people have learned not to admit to being sick or hurt, and to keep their pain to themselves.)
I hate writing about this crap, but M. Simon sent me the link. I am sick and tired of writing about the drug war. More and more, it seems that this endless drug war is becoming the number one topic of the blog. The drug war is not only a war against pain relief, it is a war against personal autonomy. It is now the Culture War. Do I exaggerate? Not in light of Newt Gingrich’s stated philosophy:
“I want a World War Two style victory plan-a decisive, all out cataclysmic effort to break the back of the drug culture.”
Yes, and let’s break the backs of patients in pain, too, because after all, according to the kindly man who wants to be our Drug War Commander-in-Chief, it’s “better to send a clear signal on no drug use at the risk of inconveniencing some people, than… to be compassionate toward a small group at the risk of telling a much larger group that it was okay to use the drug.”
In order to stop the drug culture, the “pain” loophole must be closed!
And it’s not only the rights of doctors and patients which are being targeted. Those in law enforcement who dare to voice objections to the war on drugs are finding themselves losing their jobs:
Stationed in Deming, N.M., Mr. Gonzalez was in his green-and-white Border Patrol vehicle just a few feet from the international boundary when he pulled up next to a fellow agent to chat about the frustrations of the job. If marijuana were legalized, Mr. Gonzalez acknowledges saying, the drug-related violence across the border in Mexico would cease. He then brought up an organization called Law Enforcement Against Prohibition that favors ending the war on drugs.
Those remarks, along with others expressing sympathy for illegal immigrants from Mexico, were passed along to the Border Patrol headquarters in Washington. After an investigation, a termination letter arrived that said Mr. Gonzalez held “personal views that were contrary to core characteristics of Border Patrol Agents, which are patriotism, dedication and esprit de corps.”
After his dismissal, Mr. Gonzalez joined a group even more exclusive than the Border Patrol: law enforcement officials who have lost their jobs for questioning the war on drugs and are fighting back in the courts.
There are others, and they have enlisted the help of the ACLU.
That damned pinko outfit! You let them have their way, and pretty soon we’ll all be a nation of whining junkies!
Comments
11 responses to “Enjoy the pain!”
Thanks for that. As I told you in the e-mail I was just too damned depressed to write anything about this.
I’m going to post the link around so it gets some traffic.
It’s a signal of a much bigger problem. Quite simply, a society that’s willing to risk guilty people – of any flavor – going free rather than punish the innocent is more free than one that regards the suffering of some number of innocents in order to be sure to get all the guilty.
Add in the uber-fundy notion that sickness and pain is “God’s punishment” for sin, and you end up right where the US is now.
I’d ask all the so-called “drug warriors” if they actually want their relatives suffering horrendous pain. Because sooner or later, chances are at least one of their relatives will be in dire need of pain medication.
Oh, and there’s no shortage of that dreadful stuff called “evidence” that providing people with on-demand access to pain medication results in them using less of it – because they only take it when they need it. We can’t have that, can we? Big Nanny knows better.
I left this comment:
This is your war on drugs. I guess it is the prototype for the coming death panels.
here:
http://www.talk-polywell.org/bb/viewtopic.php?t=3452
Well said, Kate. And Eric.
Well drug warriors, you own this one. Hope it makes you proud. Due to YOUR actions, sick people can’t get their meds because of your overblown FEARS that someone, somewhere is using a drug for recreational purposes that MIGHT lead to some problem or other.
So stand up and be accountable and take responsibility here.
The road to hell is paved with good intentions, so would you drug warriors please stop your paving activities now. Now do you see where your “good” intentions lead?
A well-done article… many thanks for writing it. As a conservative with libertarian leanings in things like the so-called war on drugs, reading of chronic pain patients unable to obtain painkillers is heartbreaking and angering all at once. I am both a scientist and a nurse, and recently my wife was admitted to the ER with 10/10 on the numerical pain scale. We did not know it at the time, but she had slipped a disc in her back, and was in agony. We tried all the conservative treatments, NSAIDS, ice, rest, compression, elevation, etc. – nothing worked. Yet, the nurse practitioner who saw her in the ED wanted to discharge her home with only ibuprofen! I raised hell, and finally she received some Tramadol – not a very effective pain medication – but better than nothing, plus a muscle relaxant. These relieved her suffering almost immediately. If I hadn’t been along with her to work the system in her favor, she’d have gotten nothing.
The drug war is now intruding into care of the genuinely sick and injured. This should be an outrage, but it isn’t – and that’s the tragedy.
Thanks everyone! Georgiaboy, your story is typical. The same thing happened to a woman I know who suffered a serious fracture, which was incorrectly set in the ER. This only increased the pain, and she had been sent home with Vicodin, which did nothing to stop the pain. After calling the ER and being treated like a suspect junkie (they refused to give her anything stronger), she cried herself to sleep. Only after raising hell with the hospital ombudsperson and going back in the next morning did they become reasonable. They saw their error in setting the fracture, and recognized she was in agony, so they finally gave her oxycodone, and apologized for the ER, but explained that they’re constantly besieged by druggies seeking painkillers. Huh? Are druggies now fracturing their bones to get drugs?
The other thing that drives this “no pain relief for you!” meme consists of organized activists (often working in tandem with the DEA) who constantly scream about addicted family members and overdoses. They actually want painkillers banned. Methadone clinics closed. Etc. They are organizing to “save lives” so they say, and they demonstrate in front of pain clinics:
http://articles.sun-sentinel.com/2011-02-26/news/fl-oxy-pill-mills-mayocol-b022711-20110226_1_pain-clinics-pill-abusers-organized-pill-pushers
http://www.wusf.usf.edu/news/2010/04/01/protesters_want_ban_on_oxycontin
What these people don’t seem to realize is that when the genuine addicts lose medical access, they will simply turn to street heroin.
Surely that isn’t the goal?
A philosophical question: Assume addicts are going to obtain drugs from whatever sources they can. Since when are suppliers responsible for the actions of consumers?
I have two herniated and two ruptured lumbar discs. I saw an old doctor who was good to me but then I only wanted about 80 vicodin a year. A group of doctors bought my old physician’s practice and wouldn’t give me anything for pain so I quit them when they wanted to do cortisone shots into my spine.
Don’t see any doctors now, but then I have lost some weight and the back pain is less and less often. I don’t really trust the American medical system anymore.
As for the physicians’ group, saw a few years ago where a couple of the MRI centers were shut down by the attorney general’s office ….
Yeah, me and my half a vicodin every other day were a problem …..
Now they advertise on TV as being work comp specialists ….
“I am sick and tired of writing about the drug war.”
Don’t be. You remind us that should Gingrich become president, he will ratchet up the drug war even further, despite the fact that the campaigns will be relatively silent on the issue. That was what Reagan did, with awful results–a very large blot on an overrated record. His administration didn’t reduce government at all, did it?
The entire problem begins with the wretched concept of drug control. We should never have placed a doctor’s permission between the buyer and the product.
That the tyranny is hounding biting the medical profession a century later is an unintended consequence fairly earned.
Replace Oxycodone with pseudoephedrine, and it’s what us who are not affected by phenylephrine have been experiencing since 2005 with the anti-meth laws incorporated into the PATRIOT act.
Its time for the ADA, ACLU and all other Civil Rights groups to get off there asses and help Chronic pain patients who are the only victims in the failed attempts of the DEA’s War on DRugs and Doctors who prescribe them. Addicts and Dealers have no problem seeing multiple doctors and getting all the drugs they want, they are not in unbearable pain that has them isolated from the world , they have money from selling meds and they can con doctors where the Chronic pain patient suffering is not as charming, does not have the NA social network nor the energy or money to visit multiple doctors to find one compassionate doctor. Pain clinics are just pill mills and cater to the dealers This attack on Doctors prescribing pain meds for chronic pain is doing nothing more then creating criminals by forcing innocent pain suffers to buy illegal street drugs thereby increasing the demand and thus illegal drug trade. Of course, forcing Chronic pain suffers to turn to illegal sources also gives the DEA more people to target in the senseless war on drugs and as for the increase in O.D.s I bet it is another result of the crackdown on doctors as chronic pain suffers not able to find a doctor to continue prescribing medication that stops them from living in daily pain comparable to torture decide to use the last of the medication to end it before suffering a fate worse then death. The DEA and state Medical boards have created a whole new class of criminals and are directly responsible for hundreds of deaths of people fed up with suffering and faced with never ending pain or death, personally I’ll chose death when it comes to that option. So way to Go DEA, the pain and suffering caused by your useless war should be considered criminal and is at the very least a violation of My constitutional and Civil Rights and ADA Laws, and the only way to stop this is for the civil rights groups to file a massive civil complaint for all the doctors and pain patients who are violated. If these people who trample all over our rights have no consequences for their actions, They will never stop and MY 98 year old grandmother unable to breath suffering and left screaming in pain her last few hours on earth is just one horrible consequence that these DRug Czars have caused all in the name of stopping people from hurting themselves. Where is the logic in that and as for concerns of illegal drug trade, well congrats on that front its been increased 10 fold with Doctors not writing pain meds for people suffering, and don’t forget about the increase in ODs that directly coincides with legal drug control efforts, Your doing a bang up job of if your goal is job security Come on Civil Rights Group time to stop this insanity AND HELP US FIGHT BACK. And by the way, if you look at the crime stats in countries that do not waste there resources on drug wars and consider most drug offenses minor, they HAVE NO CRIME AND THE BIGGEST ISSUE WITH DRUG USE IS THE DOCTORS BEING ADDICTED
[…] of issuing another lame appeal to reason and common sense, I am going to conclude this post by quoting myself and saying I TOLD YOU SO! The other thing that drives this “no pain relief for you!” meme […]