Has imprisoning peddlers of street drugs sent the message that their “blue collar crime” is not acceptable ? I’m not sure punishment as a deterrent would work for the white collar case either. And like I said, I’m not against it entirely. But I’m not convinced the sending a message argument is a good enough one to justify the resources being used on this front
I agree with you about every day drug dealers. We will never stop them all. But MDs have licenses with clinical requirements (like record keeping), so their activities are easily monitored and punished. I watched a documentary last year (can't remember the name) about a walk-in clinic in Detroit that opened every evening at 6pm until midnight, and it was an opiate mill. She was dishing out Rxs in exchange for money and her patrons were lined up around the block. The people doing the documentary doxxed the MD and went to the College of Physicians, but nothing happened to her. This is what I'm talking about.
Treating addicts fairly is a separate matter from going after physicians who abuse their power. Every day drug dealers are not medical experts. MDs know EXACTLY what these drugs do and the repercussions. They are held to a higher standard, or they should be. It makes my blood boil.
True, it’s not either/or, I concede that. I would be happy if the money won from the lawsuits went directly into local harm reduction programs, but I’m not confident it will. I just really hope it doesn’t go into invariably unsuccessful interdiction efforts.
The problems are system wide so I agree with you in the sense that going after a few bad apples will not totally stop the problem, but it at least sends the message that there is
some attempt to make sure these people don't get to commit crimes with impunity. Think about all the drug dealers who went to prison in the U.S. under the three strikes rule, yet doctors who create addicts get off scott free. How is that right?
I am more interested in
preventing new addicts from being created. The vast majority of opiate addicts in the U.S. were created by physicians after Oxy hit the market. They weren't created by petty dealers on street corners. Those dealers simply took advantage of a captive market of addicts.
I think the efforts are better spent on local harm reduction, that’s my bottom line. At a certain point, I don’t care what these companies did. We’re here now and we should be funneling the money into things that are proven to reduce overdose deaths. As said above, it’s great if the settlement money is used for harm reduction but I recall at least one case in North Carolina where the money went to a 12 step based church group (I’ll have to dig up the article to double check the details). To me that is not worth the time or money spent
I'm all for harm reduction, but harm reduction is an end-user approach. It's damage control. How are addicts created? Mostly they are chronic pain patients who got hooked on opiate Rxs. Then the winds of policy mostly shifted, leaving them high and dry... except for the MDs out there who have nothing to do with harm reduction and are preying on addicts, no different than dealers.
It's not enough to poo poo the past. The past is not over. There are doctors still violating their oath,
right now. I am not interested in punishing addicts. I am interested in punishing pill pushing doctors and the industries that abet them. Big pharma is out of control. They are responsible for the opiate crisis.
Onto the medical malpractice law… I don’t really care about pill mills today tbh. Imo if an individual wants e.g. hydromorphone they should be able to walk into a pharmacy and buy it. I strongly believe in legalizing all drugs (albeit with some strong regulation). In todays legal climate they only way to do this is with a doctors prescription so I don’t care if a doctor is writing opioid scripts at the patients request. They definitely should be honest about dependency and addiction risks though, which I admit historically didn’t always happen.
I'm in favour of decriminalization but not legalization. Harm reduction looks at providing for current addicts while avoiding the creation of new ones. What you are proposing is mass population addiction and I'm not in favour of that. Have you ever studied the Opium Wars of China? Britain hooked an entire nation on opium and almost destroyed China from the inside out.
I support approaches like what Portugal has done. They decriminalized small possession and then channeled a lot of money into HR. What is not widely known though is that they created strict rules for prescribing opiates.
What our society needs is a medical system that actually functions to treat chronic pain, without drugs as the first line. I work in holistic medicine (for now), and I have seen
many chronic pain patients come of drugs or avoid them altogether because of simple things like acupuncture, IMS, and massage. When you visit an MD for chronic pain, they give you drugs and just say oh well. It's draconian. There are real methods to cure chronic pain. Drug mills are lazy, corporate racketeering.
With regards to crafting “unambigous laws”: Good luck. We wouldn’t need judges if all laws were unambigous, an algorithm could do it. But English is an imprecise language and I don’t think an unambiguous law about tort will ever be created
Maybe in the U.S. that's true, but in Canada MDs can be held liable for improper prescribing. By "unambiguous", I mean it's not hard to craft laws that set out of mandatory guidelines for who gets opiates and for how long. The rules have tightened a lot in the last decade. Commensurate with this, is funding for HR to deal with people who are already addicted.
I don't favour legalization because I don't want to see a totally drugged out population. Whether or not you want to admit it, addiction is largely preventable at the front end, and you do that by restricting access and providing proper pain care. People who aren't already addicted don't just go looking for opiates on the street at random. They are incentivized by lack of support combined with naive exposure by MDs. I agree with you about HR funding though. It's desperately needed.
(Sorry for any typos.)
