HOW CAN WE STOP "DOCTOR DRUG DEALERS"?

Death by drug overdose, also known as drug poisoning, increased by 68.3% between 1999 and 2004 according to a report by the Center for Disease Control. The majority of those deaths were legal prescription drugs and the majority of those drugs were prescribed to the person who died. In fact, prescription painkillers by themselves now kill more people than Cocaine or Heroin. There has been a recent surge in prescription drug abuse in America and shady Doctors are behind a great deal of it. In this article, I'm going to decipher for you what has been going on and how little the law seems to want to do about it.

This problem strikes home for me, I have a younger brother who has been battling drug addiction most of his life and it will probably surprise most of you that he has always gotten most, if not all, of his drugs through doctors, not drug dealers. A few years back his problem had gotten so bad I was convinced he would end up being one of the thousands of deaths that occur each year here in the U.S.. In fact, once he overdosed at my Mom's house and we fought to keep him alive while we waited for an ambulance. At the hospital, the police summoned me into a private room and questioned me about the montage of various drugs that we had turned over to them that he was carrying on his person. They asked me if he did any Cocaine, "No" I replied. "Does he smoke Pot?" they questioned. "He didn't O.D. on Pot." I informed them. "Does he do any other illegal drugs?" They continued. Frustrated, I pointed to the vial filled with Oxycontin's, Vicodins, Valiums, and other drugs I couldn't even name and shouted, "Those are his drugs! That's what he O.D.'d on. What the hell are you grilling me about this other crap for?" I pointed out the Doctor's name on the vial, "That's your dealer, that's the guy who's killing him, go after him!" That's when I was baptised into the reality of our crazy drug distribution system, a system so crazy, that if you know the right Doctor you can have a script for anything you want. You can even charge it all to Medicaid.

The officer then proceeded to inform me about how, even when they know the Doctors who are creating these "Script Mills", there is very little they can do about it. For those of you that are uninitiated, it may seem like I have to be making this up, but I can assure you, it's true, and it's going on everywhere.

The problem stems from the fact that Doctors go through a great deal of education and debt to get their degrees, and the American Medical Association lobbies hard to make sure that it's very hard to take that profession away from them. They fear that Doctors can get in trouble by simply trying to do their job, relieving the pain that their patients claim that they're suffering, and that they shouldn't be held responsible for the fraction of people who lie to get the prescription and then abuse the drugs they're given. While I can certainly sympathize with that justification, the doctors I'm referring to seem to me to be easy to separate from the decent doctors that are obeying their oaths of office.

Let me run a little scenario by you for a point of reference. A doctor from another country, let's call him Dr. Hindu Bin Ladin, comes to this country with his PHD in Medicine from a prestigious Mid-Eastern University. He sets up shop in a poverty stricken big city in the U.S. and immediately begins writing scripts to any Joe who complains about back pain for Vicodin. Word gets out quickly among the local addicts, many of whom are on Medicaid, and soon a line forms. Dr. Bin Ladin charges all of them for an office call and then refers them to his brother-in-law who runs a local pharmacy to fill the scripts. Soon he's making in excess of $500,000 a year. Local law enforcement gets wind and starts filing complaints (assuming that they even waste their time) and the long 4 to 5 year process of getting his license revoked begins. Since the complaints usually aren't coming from his patients, the AMA moves slowly and when he finally can't write anymore scripts, he gathers his millions and heads back to his home country to practice medicine in his new office paid for by U.S. addicts and taxpayers. Not a bad scam.

However, it's not only foreign doctors writing these bad scripts for profit. Take a look at this long list of doctors being disciplined for abusing their Hippocratic oath.

So what can we do to put the brakes on all this abuse? Well, to start with, we can change our culture of believing that a pill is the answer to all that ails you. While I certainly wouldn't want people to refrain from getting the help they need, the problems you can create for yourself by abusing drugs can be as bad as the problem you started with if not worse. Often, once you are addicted to painkillers or opiates, the need for more may drive you to dealing with people you wouldn't normally even associate with. The cost of maintaining your habit can push you into poverty and bankruptcy. Better oversite of these "Script Mills" can help, better education of doctors wouldn't hurt either. A lot of the time, the only info doctors are getting comes from the pharmaceutical industry itself that down plays the addictive qualities of the drug. To much money is being made both by the doctors, and the pharmaceutical industry for them to monitor themselves, so obviously we need more oversite. But with the problem getting bigger every day, we need to do something soon. H.C.