Drug control becomes speech control
We read:
"When the government accuses a doctor of running a ‘pill mill,’ prosecutors portray every aspect of his practice in a sinister light. Prescribing painkillers becomes drug trafficking, applying for insurance reimbursement becomes fraud, making bank deposits becomes money laundering, and working with people at the office becomes conspiracy.
When Siobhan Reynolds thinks a doctor has been unfairly targeted for such a prosecution, she tries to counter the official narrative by highlighting the patients he has helped and dramatizing the conflict between drug control and pain control. But now the government has turned its reinterpretive powers on Reynolds, portraying the pain treatment activist’s advocacy as obstruction of justice and thereby threatening the freedom of anyone who dares to suggest there is more than one side to a criminal case.”
Source
7 comments:
This is a hard one to call, since there's no evidence in the article as to what this doctor has actually done. Obviously, he's given drugs to his patients, but there's nothing showing whether it was done legally or not. Millions of people suffer from pain, (be it real or imagined) and there's nothing they won't do or say (rightly or wrongly) to get something that will relieve that pain.
There are many doctors around the country who have become very rich prescribing drugs for anyone with cash. That's not to say this doctor is one of them, but it does happen every day. There are also overly-zealous advocates who only care about the complaints people make, be they founded or not. And yes, there are also overly-zealous prosecutors who only care about getting another conviction. (remember the Border Patrol agents who went to prison?)
We need to wait for more info on this one.
With today's law enforcement & the judicial system in the U.S. the way it is, there is no presumption of innocense. I recently had a family member involved in what should have been at worst a minor infraction. When she tried to explain that it was a family matter involving a messy divorce, the problem then became a class B felony. After having to hire an attorney and spending a ton of money, she was put on probation and was made to take random drug tests, which she had to pay for, and it was not even a drug related offence. It was all about the money the state/county would make off probation fees & drug test costs.
It's not only that McNasty. Political correctness has found it's way into our laws and the way they're enforced. A mere allegation of wrongdoing can get you cuffed and busted. Now go and hire some liar, oops, i mean lawyer, (almost the same, aren't they) pay through the nose, and you stll have to keep your fingers crossed that some PC judge doesn't make an example of you. For something.
Chronic pain is a very bad thing, and I can fully understand why people suffering from it will go outside the law if the law prohobits them the means they need to alleviate it.
I can also fully understand why doctors feel obliged to help their patients in that, their oath of office pretty much forces them to even if simple human nature wouldn't.
My mother for years suffered from chronic agonising pain.
Luckily her doctors could get her massive doses of morphine and other painkillers legally, but even then she needed to combine that with large amounts of over the counter medication and alcohol to at least make it bearable.
Had she not had access to good doctors and painkillers, we would likely have looked outside legal channels as well, to either contraband painkillers or combinations of marihuana and heroin (which has pretty much the same effect as does morphine).
Don't laugh but heroin was originally devised as a non-addictive form of morphine
Queen Victoria took hemp (the weed) to alleviate "ladies' pains". She liked scotch whisky too (even mixed with wine). But at that time all of these were perfectly legal.
Almost all of today's "illegal" drugs started out as being legal and quite useful, and still are in many places around the world. As with most things in life, it's not the drugs that are bad, but the people who abuse them.
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