News Were These Doctors Treating Pain or Dealing Drugs?

thegreenhand

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Were These Doctors Treating Pain or Dealing Drugs?​

Jan Hoffman
New York Times
28 Feb 2022

For years, Dr. Xiulu Ruan was one of the nation’s top prescribers of quick-release fentanyl drugs. The medicines were approved only for severe breakthrough pain in cancer patients, but Dr. Ruan dispensed them almost exclusively for more common ailments: neck aches, back and joint pain. According to the Department of Justice, he and his partner wrote almost 300,000 prescriptions for controlled substances from 2011 to 2015, filled through the doctors’ own pharmacy in Mobile, Ala. Dr. Ruan often signed prescriptions without seeing patients, prosecutors said.

Dr. Ruan has been serving a 21-year sentence in federal prison, convicted in 2017 for illegally prescribing opioids and related financial crimes. To collect millions of dollars in fines, the government seized houses, beach condos and bank accounts belonging to him and his business partner, as well as 23 luxury cars, such as Bentleys, Lamborghinis and Ferraris.

On Tuesday, lawyers both for Dr. Ruan and for Dr. Shakeel Kahn, who is serving 25 years on charges related to pill mill clinics in Arizona and Wyoming will argue before the Supreme Court of the United States that the criminal standard the physicians faced is applied inconsistently among the federal circuits. In asking that the doctors’ convictions be overturned, they want the court to establish a uniform standard that permits doctors to raise a “good faith” defense. Juries could then consider whether doctors subjectively believed they were using their best medical judgment.
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Read the full article here.
 
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i'll be following this case as best i can.

from the article:

At issue is the reading of the language of the Controlled Substances Act of 1970. The act permits doctors and pharmacists to dispense certain drugs such as opioids and amphetamines, categorized by their potential for abuse and medical value, even as it prohibits everyone else from doing so. It says that a prescription for one of these medications “must be issued for a legitimate medical purpose by an individual practitioner acting in the usual course of his professional practice.”
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it's not often the supreme court interprets the language of the drug war's founding document!
 
Interesting.

I mean, if we are giving "doctors" ultimate authority when it comes to dispensing drugs, which we do as a society, how the fuck can we jail one that was giving "too much" strong medicine?

I haven't read into his case, and maybe someone died from his prescribing habits? But if that's the case, he should be charged with malpractice and not "dealing drugs".

Of course, this is my opinion based on how society actually operates, and not on how it "should" really.
 
one of the doctors allegedly was prescribing without even seeing the patients, which is obvious malpractice.

but like you said charging them as a drug dealer is pretty contradictory to allowing them to prescribe controlled substances in the first place

i dont know what the exact numbers are but the DEA shuts down a lot of addiction treatment centers on the grounds of being 'pill mills'

a court ruling in the doctor's favor would theoretically put a stop to this practice as medical malpractice is not the DEA's domain
 
There are doctors doing decades in jail or stripped of licenses that were very legitimate and not pill mills. There were just treating super severe patients who's needs exceeded the CDCs 2016 guidelines which the DEA weaponized against doctors and patients since they were failing miserably against the cartel...easier targets.

Luckily the CDC just retracted their bullshit guidelines a month or so ago basically saying they were a mistake.

Will the DEA stop justifying this attack on patients that jas gone way beyond getting pill mills? Probably not. They want to create more fent addicts so they can point to how bad the drug problem is and get more money to fight it.
 
thegreenhand said:
one of the doctors allegedly was prescribing without even seeing the patients, which is obvious malpractice.
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I've not seen my prescribing doctor since before the pandemic but during that time I've been put on opioid patches for the first time. Never had opioid pills or similar prescribed before and never met the doctor who started me on opioids, not once. I'm not complaining, lol.
 
thegreenhand said:

Were These Doctors Treating Pain or Dealing Drugs?​

Jan Hoffman
New York Times
28 Feb 2022



Read the full article here.
Click to expand...
Dealing drugs
did you see the Insys drug deal? They paid drs to prescribe I watched a video on it and they had a dancing bottle of spray fentanyl rapping about titration because they gave bonuses for getting people on higher doses and a huge payout when they hit the top dose of 1800 mg
shit was fucking sick
www.fda.gov

Founder and Former Chairman of the Board of Insys Therapeutics

FDA OCI, Insys, bribe, bribery, racketeering, conspiracy, John Kapoor, founder, sentence, 66 months, kickbacks, Subsys, fentanyl, speaker program, spray delivery
www.fda.gov www.fda.gov
 
It is slightly irritating that the Supreme Court will take months to rule on this. The doctors do seem to be guilty of malpractice, but charging doctors under the Controlled Substances Act as drug dealers for severe overprescribing seems fucking ludicrous.

From the sounds of it both doctors rightfully lost their practicing licenses, but I question if the American prison system is the right place for them. Surely paying restitution to the victims and a lifetime ban preventing them from working in any field resembling medicine is sufficient. If you operated a pill mill, then people who went there made the choice to use opioids. While any doctor should inform their patients of the risks of a medication, I do not see them as people who are necessarily significantly more deserving of imprisonment than the average marketing employee of the tobacco industry or the store clerk selling beer and cigarettes to every 18/19/21+ schmuck who walks in with a driver's license and a couple bills or a credit card.

While the fact that oxycontin is highly addictive has been known for centuries, I see the Purdue Pharma machine as far more guilty here than the individual doctors who carried out the orders given to them by the megacorporations of the pharmaceutical industry. But we in the West have the disastrous tendency of punishing a few figureheads instead of dismantling the machine as a whole and pulling its roots out of the soil.
 
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arrall said:
but I question if the American prison system is the right place for them. Surely paying restitution to the victims and a lifetime ban preventing them from working in any field resembling medicine is sufficient
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Kinda disagree with the take of most people so far.
The problem with just punishing them financially is that, when you reach that level of wealth, there ain't no way the government can find it all. Sure they can damage the doctors significantly, and removing their licence means they can't repeat it, but they're still left with a significant amount of profit from the whole situation.

And while there's no difference from someone that sells tobacco and alcohol, if as a society you're gonna be punishing and imprisoning any random bloke that sells dope on the streets, I don't see why you'd make an exception for the rich profiting their ass off, just cause they decided to drug deal with a different business model and with prestige titles and degrees thrown in the mix.

Just to be clear, reckon all drugs should be legal and sold freely to adults that wanna have them. And I don't think the doctors necessarily did something wrong if they just gave it out to anyone that asked for the drugs.
But if as a medical professional, you push highly addictive drugs to an unsuspecting audience that trusts you that they need the pills cause you're a doctor, then you're definitely doing something wrong. And they shouldn't be treated special anyway
 
It's kind of conflicting for me.



I agree with what LucidDreamer said though.

Fentanyl is a shit drug that kills easier than any of the semi-synthetics. And I think people should have a right to opiates if they feel they need them for whatever ailment (even those not related to just pain).

The whole "opioid crisis" was artificially manufactured to push an agenda, through over prescribing of fentanyl, inflating overdose numbers by including poly-drug deaths as "opioid deaths" and then letting fentanyl take over the street supply. Now they can make heroin & other opiates look more "scary" with all the damage their shitty fentanyl has done and is doing. Which leads to restricted access to some of the best medicines we have.

Can''t have people feeling good off cheap to make opiates cause then big pharma can't rake in the cash with their antidepressants, antipsychotics and mood stabilizers, since opiates can take care of all of that.
 
deficiT said:
Interesting.

I mean, if we are giving "doctors" ultimate authority when it comes to dispensing drugs, which we do as a society, how the fuck can we jail one that was giving "too much" strong medicine?
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Yeah, it REALLY pisses me off. The doctors weren't forcing these people to get drugs. It's a symbiotic relationship between doctor and patient. In other words, "You give me the drugs and bill my insurance whatever the fuck you want."

I think we all know that the government's attempt to deal with the "Opioid Crisis" is a massive fucking failure. If we can't get our drugs from doctors, we WILL find other ways. And many of us will die, unfortunately. Shit, people who've always said, "I'll never do heroin," end up doing it because they can't get the pills they REALLY want.

Hey, America! More people are dying as a result of your little war on drugs. Nice fucking job, you miserable cunt.

Edit: The definition of "Opioid Crisis" - I'm out of drugs. 💋
 
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Preytor said:
Kinda disagree with the take of most people so far.
The problem with just punishing them financially is that, when you reach that level of wealth, there ain't no way the government can find it all. Sure they can damage the doctors significantly, and removing their licence means they can't repeat it, but they're still left with a significant amount of profit from the whole situation.
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But throwing them in jail does nothing to undo the damage that they have done. It is an emotional solution that solves nothing.
Preytor said:
And while there's no difference from someone that sells tobacco and alcohol, if as a society you're gonna be punishing and imprisoning any random bloke that sells dope on the streets, I don't see why you'd make an exception for the rich profiting their ass off, just cause they decided to drug deal with a different business model and with prestige titles and degrees thrown in the mix.
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“If X is bad but we are doing it right now to group A, then we should do more of X because group B deserves it more than group A.” is not the way to go about things. We shouldn’t be expanding prohibition because some people get away with selling drugs, we should do away with prohibition all together.

My point is that nobody should be punished for selling drugs provided that they are not misrepresenting what they are selling. If Person A drinks 20 monster energy drinks and has a heart attack, we all agree that Person A is the idiot. If person B drinks themselves to death with 2 40ozs, we don’t blame the liquor store. But if a drug dealer sells Person C an eight ball of meth and Person C swallows the whole thing at once with zero stim tolerance and has the predictably resulting cardiovascular + psychological + neurological + other physiological damage, we blame the drug dealer.

I don’t think that the government should be policing what people put into their bodies. Just teaching people how to do so safely and responsibly, and providing extensive mental health + trauma + addiction treatment to anyone who wants it.
Preytor said:
Just to be clear, reckon all drugs should be legal and sold freely to adults that wanna have them. And I don't think the doctors necessarily did something wrong if they just gave it out to anyone that asked for the drugs.
But if as a medical professional, you push highly addictive drugs to an unsuspecting audience that trusts you that they need the pills cause you're a doctor, then you're definitely doing something wrong. And they shouldn't be treated special anyway
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I agree. I just don’t see the point in imprisoning individuals as opposed to addressing the issues in the pharmaceutical and medical systems and the way we treated drug use which allowed the opioid crisis to occur. We can pick a couple figureheads like these doctors and the Purdue pharma execs (who should have their company liquidated and be forced to pay billions in restitution to the victims) to punish, but prison time will unfortunately do nothing to cure those people’s addictions. The USA is a world leader in imprisonments per capita. So if we could cure drug use with imprisonment, then it would have happened already. Spending the time and money on getting the victims of this crisis therapy and treatment to help them get clean will fix this. Throwing corrupt doctors in prison will not.
 
arrall said:
It is slightly irritating that the Supreme Court will take months to rule on this. The doctors do seem to be guilty of malpractice, but charging doctors under the Controlled Substances Act as drug dealers for severe overprescribing seems fucking ludicrous.

From the sounds of it both doctors rightfully lost their practicing licenses, but I question if the American prison system is the right place for them. Surely paying restitution to the victims and a lifetime ban preventing them from working in any field resembling medicine is sufficient. If you operated a pill mill, then people who went there made the choice to use opioids. While any doctor should inform their patients of the risks of a medication, I do not see them as people who are necessarily significantly more deserving of imprisonment than the average marketing employee of the tobacco industry or the store clerk selling beer and cigarettes to every 18/19/21+ schmuck who walks in with a driver's license and a couple bills or a credit card.

While the fact that oxycontin is highly addictive has been known for centuries, I see the Purdue Pharma machine as far more guilty here than the individual doctors who carried out the orders given to them by the megacorporations of the pharmaceutical industry. But we in the West have the disastrous tendency of punishing a few figureheads instead of dismantling the machine as a whole and pulling its roots out of the soil.
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Good points!... Here in PA, there was a Dr. in a nearby town that turned his practice into an Oxycontin dispensary. He was busted by PA Attorney General's office after 2 patients overdosed and died. the DEA was not involved. It was handled by the PA Drug Task Force and the AG. Third degree murder charges and a host of other lesser charges..He was convicted and will be in State Prison forever..you are so right about the hypocrisy and conflicts of interest here... the doctor would be more useful outside the prison system but authorities usually don't allow bad behavior by someone who should have known better. Like any addict, he will be restricted because of a weakness to return to his former practices. I don't have the answers but the justice system is messed up for sure...
 
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