Washington’s self-styled morality police are mugging for the camera while their agents intimidate suffering patients and prosecute physicians.  To distract from the brutality, they use high dollar word weasels to make it politically correct.

The Department of Justice (DOJ) has instructed its Drug Enforcement Agency (DEA) to retarget the war on drugs and skip over decades of failure. Instead of halting heroin from Mexico and Afghanistan-Iran-Europe, or cocaine from Columbia, or meth from most areas of the US, the DEA has set its sights on softer targets – people in pain and the physicians providing treatments that are medically correct, but not politically correct.

Since 1914, the Congress has been pontificating on the morality of addiction and sending medically unschooled police to halt pain treatment that uses Scheduled drugs (e.g. codeine, vicodin, morphine, fentanyl).  Our federal Vatican, (aka DOJ) and its political-appointees deeply resent their medical and moral judgments being questioned by mere physicians.

DOJ’s new war on drugs has harvested some genuine criminals, but has inflicted far more collateral damage among the weaker targets; patients, physicians, and pharmacists who have been intimidated or prosecuted. A month ago, a local harmacy told me they stopped filling prescriptions for Schedule II drugs, because it could not get enough supply to meet its patients’ needs.

The supply shortage was a direct outcome of aggressive state and DEA actions upon drug supply chains, so instead of rationing the paltry supply, the pharmacy stopped filling Schedule II scripts.  I’m sure NSA has my name in a database for DEA’s future use.

Beyond pharmacists, hundreds of physicians have felt the wrath and crushing expense of prosecution by DOJ lawyers.  The 100 million of us whose illness or injuries require strong pain medicine have noticed that fewer physicians are willing to put their careers at risk from DEA’s politically-motivated threats of prosecution.

We welcome DOJ’s vigorous pursuit of makers and dealers in unlawful drugs – Godspeed, but let’s ditch the drug laws that are rooted in politicians’ religious bias and scientific ignorance. Let’s have level-headed physicians set policy on patients’ access to medicines that are medically appropriate.

Alan Daley is a retired businessman who lives in Florida and who writes for The American Consumer Institute Center for Citizen Research

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