Drug laws found to cause ‘needless suffering.’ What ever shall we do?

"Heightened efforts by the Drug Enforcement Administration to crack down on narcotics abuse are producing a troubling side effect by denying some hospice and elderly patients needed pain medication," reported Washington Post staff writer Carrie Johnson on Oct. 29, 2009.

Tougher enforcement of the Controlled Substances Act, which tightly restricts the distribution of pain medicines including morphine and Percocet, "is causing pharmacies to balk and is leading to delays in pain relief for those patients and seniors in long-term-care facilities," Sens. Herb Kohl, D-Wis., and Sheldon Whitehouse, D-R.I., wrote in a letter to Attorney General Eric H. Holder Jr. this month.

The law "fails to recognize how prescribing practitioners and the nurses who work for long-term care facilities and hospice programs actually order prescription medications," write Kohl and Whitehouse, who are senators, meaning its their job to, um ... let me see here ... enact the narcotics laws?

Most nursing homes do not have pharmacies or doctors on site, see. The new regulations thus cause delays which can lead to "adverse health outcomes and unnecessary rehospitalizations, not to mention needless suffering," the senators note.

"The system is broken. It isn't working, and patients are suffering," comments Claudia Schlosberg, director of policy and advocacy for the American Society of Consultant Pharmacists. "While we need to ensure there are proper controls on the medications, the overall law enforcement concern has to be compatible with meeting patients' needs, and right now it's not."

Wow! Talk about an unforeseeable outcome! How could anyone in government have foreseen that making it harder to write painkiller prescriptions — causing doctors to worry they might lose their careers or even go to jail for "writing too many" should some low-level orderly turn out to be palming pills and selling them — might POSSIBLY result in nursing home patients writhing in agony, shouting "Kill me! Just kill me! I can't stand this pain!"?

After all, these outcomes are only revealed um ... every couple of years, like clockwork. Ms. Sclosberg is just plain wrong. Doctors and pharmacists are charged with relieving suffering. Neither they nor anyone else "needs to ensure there are proper controls on medications," other than placing them on higher shelves so young children can't grab them without their parents' permission.

Starting with the Harrison Narcotics Act of 1914, government has sworn up and down for 95 years that "This is just a truth-in-labeling bill; we just want to make sure the consumer knows what's in Mother McCree's Soothing Syrup — precisely what dose of heroin is contained in each spoonful. We'll NEVER use this regime to actually LIMIT what a doctor can prescribe for his patient."

They lied every time. They lied more times than Lucy holding the football for Charlie Brown. They're out of chances.

And what has been the result? Does anyone honestly believe a young person who wants to lay hands on his or her drug of choice is going to be inconvenienced by more than a few minutes? The quality of pot and cocaine and heroin on the streets has been improving, even as prices have been dropping, for decades. Meantime, just as alcohol Prohibition turned us from a nation of beer and wine drinkers into a nation of cocktail addicts (by creating an incentive for smugglers to move hard liquor, which offers more profit per gallon) so has drug prohibition turned us from a nation where the small minority who craved opium smoked the stuff, and those who sought cocaine drank it in Coca-Cola, into a nation shooting heroin and smoking crack. Way to go, guys.

"Well, what's YOUR solution?" the control-freak fascists always ask. Then, when you tell them, they stare at you like you're no longer speaking English.

One more time: The Constitution grants no authority for the government to meddle in the distribution of drugs, nor the practice of medicine. Restore the free market, as our grandparents knew it before 1914. Open the prison gates. Repeal all the drug laws. Now.