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Excerpts from a Cato Institute Policy Analysis: "The government is waging an aggressive, intemperate, unjustified war on pain doctors." This PSA contains excerpts from a Cato Institute Policy Analysis No. 545, June 16, 2005, "Treating Doctors as Drug Dealers," by Ronald T. Libby, Professor of Political Science and Public Administration at the University of North Florida. The original publication from Cato is also available for download.

This advertisement appears in the New Republic, the American Prospect, The Nation, Reason Magazine, and The Progressive in the summer of 2005.

A camera-ready copy of this PSA is available in Portable Document Format (PDF).
Excerpts from Cato Institute Analysis*:
"The government is waging an aggressive, intemperate, unjustified war on pain doctors."
"By demonizing physicians as drug dealers and exaggerating the health risk of pain management, the federal government has made physicians scapegoats for the failed drug war. Even worse, the Drug Enforcement Administration's renewed war on pain doctors has frightened many physicians out of pain management altogether, exacerbating an already serious health crisis - the widespread undertreatment of intractable pain."

"Experts agree that tens of millions of Americans suffer from undertreated or untreated pain ... According to one 1999 survey, just one in four pain patients received treatment adequate to alleviate suffering."

"The medical evidence overwhelmingly indicates that when administered properly, opioid therapy rarely, if ever, results in 'accidental addiction' or opioid abuse."

"Pain specialists make an important distinction between patients who depend on opiates to function normally – to get out of bed, tend to household chores, and hold down jobs – and
addicts who take drugs for euphoria, and whose lifestyles deteriorate as a result of taking opiates, instead of improving. The DEA makes no such distinction."

"The relationship between a doctor and his patient is crucial to the proper assessment and treatment of the patient's condition. The DEA's aggressive investigative procedure poisons the doctor-patient relationship from both sides."

"The DEA continues to lower its evidentiary standards, making it nearly impossible for many doctors to determine what is and isn’t permitted."

"Large quantities of narcotics routinely go missing en route from manufacturers to wholesalers and from wholesalers to retailers. The DEA itself acknowledges this problem. Given the poor job the DEA is doing of monitoring the narcotics it's charged with overseeing ... DEA's attempt to blame physicians for the drugs' street availability seems arbitrary, unjustified, and capricious."
Common Sense for Drug Policy
www.CommonSenseDrugPolicy.org  www.DrugWarFacts.org
H. Michael Gray, Chair; Robert E. Field, Co-Chair

* "Treating Doctors as Drug Dealers: The DEA's War on Prescription Painkillers" by Professor Ronald T. Libby, June 16, 2005.
http://www.cato.org/pubs/pas/pa545.pdf