Media interest in the war against pain patients?

https://www.facebook.com/PatientsUnitedForDeaReform

Rachel Gotbaum
June 25 at 2:04pm
Hi George– It’s Rachel from NPR Can you please call me? 617 three 7 eight 14 nine 5

https://reason.com/blog/2013/05/10/meet-a-muscular-dystrophy-sufferer-whos

Unfortunately, the DEA has made it incredibly difficult for Floridians in pain to get such drugs, and for pharmacies to sell them. The highly regulated process George Sullivan describes in his op-ed for the National Pain Report is downright sadistic:

For years now, Colleen has been required by law to see her doctor every 30 days, so he can write prescriptions for pain relief medicines. She is forced to make a 50-mile round trip and sit in a waiting room full of sneezing and coughing sick people; while her immune system is suppressed by Cellcept, a powerful drug normally used to prevent organ rejection in transplant patients.

In addition, she must take a state required drug test to prove that she takes her medications. She has passed every one.

Then the next step of the ordeal begins. The hunt. The pharmacy crawl. First, we see the pharmacist at the large chain drugstore where Colleen spends an average of a thousand dollars a month on prescriptions. There’s no problem there, except for the pain meds.

“We don’t have them in stock”… “We’re sold out”… “The DEA won’t let us fill our orders”… is what we are told.

Then we drive to the next pharmacy and are told the same thing.

“We haven’t gotten our orders in a month”… or “Maybe you should see a doctor and pharmacy in Miami.”

That would be a 240 mile round trip for us.

Do we sit and wait, as another pharmacist suggests? Or “stop in on Saturday, to see if anything has come in.”

By then Colleen will be out of the precious medicine that lets her get up in the morning and sleep at night. The meds that make it possible for her to ride in a car when she sees a doctor, or to occasionally go shopping or to a restaurant.

Without the medicine she depends on, Colleen is stuck in pain.

So tomorrow I’ll drive 80 miles up to Key Largo, to see if they have it. The pharmacists won’t tell you over the phone. They are scared and I don’t blame them. The DEA has set so many rules and traps for them, they trust no one.

Because of the hell his daughter has to go through for pain relief, George Sullivan has started a Facebook group called Patients United for DEA Reform. While I wish him the best, the DEA’s approach to fighting prescription pill abuse–even when it involves encouraging law enforcement to circumvent the Fourth Amendment and depriving nursing home residents of pain relief–has near unanimous approval from the White House and Congress.