by Patrick Appel
In part two of his series, Radley Balko largely blames unethical pain management on the government's crackdown:
[T]he reason so few painkillers are prescribed by pain specialists is likely that after a decade of policies targeting doctors with costly investigations and criminal charges, there simply aren't many conscientious pain specialists left.
In his paper for Cato, Ron Libby includes multiple warnings from palliative care specialists that this was exactly what was happening. In 2003, for example, David Brushwood, who is both an attorney and a professor at the University of Florida College of Pharmacy, told the Decatur News that physicians once had a cordial relationship with drug cops–that if a doctor suspected a patient was diverting, he would cooperate with the police to turn in the patient. But for the DEA, doctors became high-profile targets, and thanks to asset forfeiture, lucrative targets as well. Since the DEA campaign, Brushwood said, the cops "watch as a small problem becomes a much larger problem . . . [then] they bring the SWAT team in with bulletproof vests and M16s . . . with charges [of] murder and manslaughter."
The Dish 