A unanimous Supreme Court decision is a good first step for getting law enforcement out of prescription decisions. Drs. Jeffrey Singer and Josh Bloom in Reason Magazine.
DEA
The DEA lifted its 2007 ban on methadone clinics sending out mobile units to reach people in communities underserved by the clinics. But patients are required to take the methadone in the presence of clinic staff. A better solution is to let doctors prescribe take-home methadone, like they do in Canada, UK, Australia--and they were permitted to do as an emergency measure during the pandemic.
In today's "just when you think it can't get any worse" feature, DEA agents are now seizing counterfeit Adderall pills that contain pure methamphetamine. Although Mexican drug cartels are blamed for making these pills to get young people addicted to meth, the ultimate blame falls on DEA policies. What a mess.
Is sticking your finger down your throat a pleasant experience? How about sticking it down there and leaving it for three weeks? You probably wouldn't want to be awake for that, but a shortage of IV hospital drugs is causing some real problems for intubated patients on ventilators. And guess what drug they're out of? Fentanyl(!). And if you read on you'll get that, plus a bubble bath with Kim Jong-un, all in one idiotic article.
Methamphetamine has made an unprecedented comeback, surpassing even fentanyl in drug overdose deaths in certain parts of the U.S. It hasn't shown up by accident; it's an offshoot of the misinformed anti-opioid movement. But it took two different government screwups to cause this latest mess: one that gave us pure, cheap meth and another that gave addicts the reason to use it. Nice going.
Two Arkansas professors were recently charged with making methamphetamine. But the chemical that police found was a simple reagent called benzyl chloride. Are these guys guilty? It all depends on the chemistry.
The DEA, which has been merciless to pain patients in its misdirected war on opioids, just stepped it up even further. Thanks to an Oregon Representative, we now have SORS (yet another way to restrict prescription painkillers) and SUPPORT, the law that created it. Just plain (and pain) awful.
The DEA, an arm of the Department of Justice, released a 184-page report claiming that prescription opioid analgesics is the drug class that's killing the most Americans. Huh? This sure seems strange. But a closer look suggests that the only thing strange is the manner in which that data is used in the report. The DEA spins and wins. Pain patients lose.
In a trend described as shocking, people desperate to obtain narcotics are intentionally injuring their pets to divert and abuse the veterinarian’s painkiller prescriptions. While terribly sad this is no surprise: After all, this is addiction.
It's no surprise that drug traffickers are quite creative about distributing their products. Recently, the Drug Enforcement Agency and Homeland Security pounced on an operation that used Donald Duck and Winnie the Pooh objects to disguise illegal shipments.
Amidst the noise of the opioid crisis is a pernicious shift in power, from doctors and their patients to the government. In a futile attempt to fight the unwinnable war on drugs, many states are now restricting what doctors can prescribe. Dr. Josh Bloom whose recent Op-Ed appeared in the Las Vegas Tribune-Review, looks at this frightening trend.
It is no secret that narcotic abuse mostly oxycodone and hydrocodone (the ingredients in Percocet and Vicodin, respectively) is a serious and growing problem in the US. So, leave it to our government the DEA in particular to screw it up more. Except, this time, their actions are certainly going to hurt patients with legitimate needs, and probably do little or nothing to combat the abuse problems. It may even make the problem worse.