Politics and Dharma

You can tell that a news wire article is full of inaccuracies if it quotes anyone from the ONDCP. Just a mention of this acronym, or of “Drug Czar” John Walters, is a sure tipoff that whatever you’re reading has been churned and spun into entirely contrived propaganda.

Case in point: a recent AP article screaming about how pain medication use has increased (”nearly doubled!”) over recent years. (”Enough to give 300mg of painkillers to every person in the country.” Whoa! Where’s mine?) The led proclaims that Americans are “popping pills at an alarming rate.” But that’s not really what the article says at all.

Only after several maudlin paragraphs reminding the reader about the evils of Oxycodone and Appalachian hillbillies do we see the AP’s “independent” analysis of DEA data that states the shocking observation that as our population grows older, more doctors are finally beginning to attend to pain as a treatable condition. So this ‘alarming rate’ is that of actual patients getting actual treatment. The horrors!

Due to increasing pressure from the feds, medical doctors have for some time been generally unwilling to prescribe pain medication for chronic conditions. Like the director of medical affairs mentioned at the end of the article — a pain treatment specialist who doesn’t prescribe any pain medication for fear of his liability at the hands of the feds.

Places that specialize in pain management have been springing up, like the one highlighted in the wire article. But the feds call these ‘pill mills’, and promptly smash them upon discovery, leaving their patients “like rats, scurrying from a burning building, trying to get their fix” in the words of one medical internist.

Just imagine — old people: like rats. War veterans trying to get their ‘fix’. Cancer patients scurrying from one drug hideout to the next. I can totally see his point that these folks were probably immoral and deserved their fate. With empathy like this, you know this guy will go far in Western medicine.