Posted by med_empowered on February 15, 2007, at 2:53:23
In reply to Re: prescription drug abuse report » laima, posted by donut on February 14, 2007, at 23:31:34
just a couple thoughts....
1) "abuse" is kinda of a loose term that the DEA loves to exploit. For example: a couple weeks ago, I had a migraine from hell. I was out of Midrin. A friend gave me a Vicodin. I didn't have an RX, and I got the Vicodin from a friend..that's abuse. Does it matter that I only took 1/2 a pill? No. Its abuse.
2) Don't ever trust the DEA. Ever. These people get million$ to "fight drugs". Now, the War On Drugs has been going on since Nixon, and we're not winning. We've locked up lots of poor people and minority people, and we've eaten away at civil liberties in the US, but the war is not won. The war on RX drugs? That's going to be much easier to "win" since the DEA controls these drugs anyway, and since so much of the medical establishment has already bought into the addiction/drugs are bad dogma. So they can get visible "results" (reduced prescribing of certain drugs) without actually HELPING anyone--basically, they'll screw over patients, scare doctors, and reduce the quality of healthcare while reducing privacy and calling it all "progress".
I think it will be harder to get pain meds. In the 70s, they went after amphetamines--rxing went down. Now some states track individual rxs by patient in databases. Some even want to track by dosage, so if the DEA thinks your doc is giving you too much of a controlled substance, they might "suggest" a doc lower it a bit (much as they might "suggest" a doc may want to keep his/her license)."Drug Abuse" has been the biggest excuse ever for the government to use resources and violate privacy. When the first anti-drug laws were passed, some lawmakers voted against it--after all, how ridiculous was it to regulate what someone could or could not put in their bodies? Its been downhill from there, and now the US imprisons a higher percentage of its population than most other industrialized countries. I guess the DEA got tired of going after minorities and poor people and decided to zero in on people in pain, people suffering from anxiety, and the doctors who dare to help them. I guess they just haven't suffered enough.
poster:med_empowered
thread:732898
URL: http://www.dr-bob.org/babble/20070213/msgs/732998.html