The Party of Pain
By John Tierney
As the baby boomers age, more and more Americans will either be enduring chronic pain or taking care of someone in pain. The Republican Party has been reaching out to them with a two-step plan:
1. Do not give patients medicine to ease their pain.
2. If they are in great pain and near death, do not let them put an end to their misery.
The Republicans have been so determined to become the Pain Party that they’ve brushed aside their traditional belief in states’ rights. The Bush administration wants lawyers in Washington and federal prosecutors with no medical training to tell doctors how to treat patients.
As attorney general, John Ashcroft decided that Oregon’s law allowing physician-assisted suicide violated the federal Controlled Substances Act because he didn’t consider this use of drugs to be a “legitimate medical purpose.” Karen Tandy, the head of the Drug Enforcement Administration, has been using this same legal theory to decree how doctors should medicate patients with pain, and those who disagree with her medical judgment can be sent to prison.
You know Republicans have lost their bearings when they need a lesson in states’ rights from Janet Reno, who considered the Oregon law when she was attorney general. For the federal government to decide what constituted legitimate medicine, she wrote, would wrongly “displace the states as the primary regulators of the medical profession.”
[. . .]
As noted in The New England Journal of Medicine this month, the D.E.A. has made doctors reluctant to give opioids to desperately ill patients, even when these drugs are the most effective pain treatment. The article warned that a victory for the Bush administration in the Oregon case, besides affecting terminally ill patients in Oregon, could cause doctors across the country to “abandon patients and their families in their moment of greatest need.”
The Supreme Court’s decision is a victory for patients and their doctors – including, I hope, some of the ones in prison for violating the federal legal theory that has now been rejected by the court. The doctors should go free, and Republicans in the White House and Congress should restrain the drug warriors who locked them up. When this year’s budget is drawn up, it’s the D.E.A.’s turn to feel pain.
Read the whole thing...
John Tierney Republican Party DEA Tierney Oregon Physician Assisted Suicide Bush
