The Increasing Politics of Pain Control

Story here.

For those who have known me for a bit, I spent a long time working with cancer patients as well as serving as a hospice volunteer. I've been an advocate for proper control of pain; there are better ways to reduce the potential for or the access to drugs due to addiction than by denying those with true pain the medications or treatments they need.

Indeed, prohibition of many painkillers will do nothing more than drive addiction into greater rampancy while creating even more suffering among those who really require relief from pain. You hear a lot about Big Pharma controlling what drugs you can take without a prescription and some of this is accurate. The Partnership for a Drug Free America is funded, in large part, by companies like pharmaceutical manufacturers, and the alcohol and tobacco industries that don't want "illicit" drugs to compete with their markets.

But too little is appreciated about what the extreme right and some fundamentalists are doing. Remember how they went nuts that Terri Schiavo might be getting morphine to ease her passing? They're throwing up roadblocks all over for the use of drugs in pain control (probably while they guzzle their alcohol and Viagra and Propecia).