While campaigning, then-candidate Joe Biden proposed to make life much harder for pain patients, the disabled, and addicts. As President, he has lived up to his word.
While campaigning, then-candidate Joe Biden proposed to make life much harder for pain patients, the disabled, and addicts. As President, he has lived up to his word.
The US Drug Enforcement Administration, led by Democrats, is enacting a plan to expand patient surveillance massively, circumventing HIPPA protections and codifying the unofficial regulations that make up the prescription opioid prohibition. In the face of a worsening opioid crisis, regulators and federal and state governments hope to make getting pain treatment more impossible.
Even as millions of patients cry out for help and scientific institutions put out studies advocating sheer barbarism, the age of Biden will mean not only a weakened economy, a government-run amuck but a medical surveillance state.
If true, this requires an immediate explanation from the Biden administration. Medication-assisted treatment can save lives, and the buprenorphine waiver requirement should be eliminated so that physicians can more easily prescribe it to those who need it. https://t.co/IGVz26rfqO
— Sen. Maggie Hassan (@SenatorHassan)
Shortly after the 2020 Presidential election, Filter Magazine discovered that the DEA had put out an official notice requesting proposals for programmers to help them create a surveillance system to monitor at least 85 percent of all prescriptions nationwide. The program would also monitor patient behaviors as well as prescribers and pharmacists.
To quote the DEA: what they hope to build is a way for their agents to get "unlimited access to patient de-identified data" on virtually everyone. It would be like Google, but for the DEA to monitor every patient and medical professional.
Previously, the DEA and the federal government led a campaign—aided by new state laws mandating Prescription Drug Monitoring Programs (PDMPs) and Narxscores—to force pharmacies and doctors to give-up prescription information. Followed often by an informal call or letter meant to intimidate them into abandoning patients.
As Walmart pointed out when they sued the Department of Justice and the DEA, "We are bringing this lawsuit because there is no federal law requiring pharmacists to interfere in the doctor-patient relationship to the degree DOJ is demanding, and in fact expert federal and state health agencies routinely say it is not allowed and potentially harmful to patients with legitimate medical needs."
Does President Biden or his administration even care?
In his first week of office, Biden rescinded a regulation-making the addiction drug buprenorphine easier to prescribe. And he also killed pharmaceutical protections, ensuring the cost of insulin to skyrocket.
His new czars and cabinet members lead the scientific institutions and regulators like the FDA, the CDC, and the NIH, coming out with decidedly strict and morally outrageous positions on ethics.
The prominent and influential peer-reviewed journal, The Annals of Family Medicine, published a study determining it ethical to deny pain treatment on the singular basis if they live alone. The World Health Organization put out official guidelines suggesting that only when a child is dying should they be allowed opioid pain medication. You are right to think this extreme, but their position is backed by a similar sentiment from the American Pediatric Surgical Association.
You may be surprised to find out that this expansion of government regulation has little to do with opioid prescriptions. Which, as of right now, are at a 20-year low while our overdose deaths are at an all-time high.
The opioid crisis is fake news. By a large margin, the vast majority of opioid overdose deaths—while tragedies—are polysubstance abusers killed by illegal Chinese fentanyl. Studies show a range of pain medicine deaths attributed to be 2 percent or less. It is the illegal, and not legal distribution, of pain pills that needs to be dealth with.
It is a fact. Every autopsy analysis, yearly drug review, and substance abuse study confirms it. Drug use in the US did not significantly increase in the last decade, as much as the substances they were taking got more lethal. A massive change caused unintentionally by the geniuses at the FDA.
At heart the opioid crisis is a black swan of interconnecting unholy incentives to screw American patients over. The crisis was born from the multi-billion-dollar effort by "big litigation" and its allies; to find a new milk cow after the easy cash in big tobacco went dry. In turn, "big lawyer" pays the media for coverage, who are all too happy to gorge themselves on the drama. For law enforcement: the crisis represents a chance to fill their coffers (the DEA is dependent on asset forfeiture), hoping to prove to the politicians and the public their usefulness in a world that is more accommodating to drug use and much harder to catch drug dealers.
Opioids have become, for our elite members, a way to prove their righteousness and make a name for themselves. And the system is willing to oblige, regardless of whatever the law says.
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But opioids are not tobacco. There is a genuine cost in tolls of human lives when you prohibit the essential component that makes the miracle of modern medicine possible. For 80 percent of the world's population, there is a desperate need for more opioids, not less. Unfortunately, for American hospitals, the DEA, and politicians like Senator Elizabeth Warren, have idiotically encouraged an artificial shortage even while fighting a pandemic.
I pray, dear readers, that when you hear that cancer kids are denied pain medication, that it makes you want to throw up. I can strongly remember watching my sister when she was only 3-years-old and fighting ovarian cancer. I cannot imagine the horrors inflicted by denying a child pain relief. Even for adults, being denied effective pain treatment can lead to significant health problems, including heart attacks and strokes.
Yet, I have talked to hundreds of patients and families over the last four years, who have significant diseases such as cancer, and are still denied pain medication. It sounds insane, but every day, across the US, there is a scared medical professional who tells a patient in confidence: "sorry, I know you need this, but it isn't worth losing my license." Or "sorry, I know your Dad is dying from pancreatic cancer, but I don't want him to become an addict."
Consider that in 2016, at least 18 million relied on opioid prescriptions; five years later, perhaps millions of patients abandoned, putting US opioid prescribing at a 20-year low. Yet, our overdose crisis is worse than ever.
In the Trump era, things got bad enough. Recent studies examining Medicare found many patients had been abruptly discontinued. Another study found that nearly half of general practices now outright refuse to take on the care of a pain patient. The power of decision-making regarding prescribing got removed from your doctor and given to the state.
But under the leadership of the Biden administration, what was unofficial playing at the margins, is becoming law. The DEA is planning to create a program that entirely ignores everyone's HIPPA privacy protections. In the face of evidence that proves prohibition doesn't work (shocker), politicians like Sen. Elizabeth Warren are demanding even more regulation, and President Joe Biden, the genie for the far left, is likely to obey.
The last time I checked, we all supported HIPPA. We know that if people knew cancer patients and dying children get denied treatment, there would be hell to pay in Washington, DC. But as you see with the lockdown, the pain is hidden behind quiet walls; and America has become deaf to those cries that somehow breakthrough.
The DEA is acting in a way that will harm the vulnerable and the healthy as well. It is an open question as to how far Biden will let them push him. Americans should say something before we are left in a fatal, painful position and find out for ourselves.