Carnal Reason

Here is John Tierney, writing from behind the NY Times firewall. I took the quote from The Agitator.

As the baby boomers age, more and more Americans will either be enduring chronic pain or taking care of someone in pain. The Republican Party has been reaching out to them with a two-step plan:

1. Do not give patients medicine to ease their pain.

2. If they are in great pain and near death, do not let them put an end to their misery.

The Republicans have been so determined to become the Pain Party that they’ve brushed aside their traditional belief in states’ rights. The Bush administration wants lawyers in Washington and federal prosecutors with no medical training to tell doctors how to treat patients.

As attorney general, John Ashcroft decided that Oregon’s law allowing physician-assisted suicide violated the federal Controlled Substances Act because he didn’t consider this use of drugs to be a ”legitimate medical purpose.” Karen Tandy, the head of the Drug Enforcement Administration, has been using this same legal theory to decree how doctors should medicate patients with pain, and those who disagree with her medical judgment can be sent to prison.

You know Republicans have lost their bearings when they need a lesson in states’ rights from Janet Reno, who considered the Oregon law when she was attorney general. For the federal government to decide what constituted legitimate medicine, she wrote, would wrongly ”displace the states as the primary regulators of the medical profession.”

[...]

The doctors who matter are the small number of specialists in pain treatment who prescribe opioids. Ronald Libby, a professor of political science at the University of North Florida, estimates that 17 percent of those doctors were investigated during one year by the D.E.A., and an even greater number of others were investigated by local and state authorities, typically in concert with the drug agency. That means a pain specialist might have a one-in-three chance of being investigated for prescribing opioids.

Faced with those odds, doctors are understandably afraid. As noted in The New England Journal of Medicine this month, the D.E.A. has made doctors reluctant to give opioids to desperately ill patients, even when these drugs are the most effective pain treatment. The article warned that a victory for the Bush administration in the Oregon case, besides affecting terminally ill patients in Oregon, could cause doctors across the country to ”abandon patients and their families in their moment of greatest need.”

The Supreme Court’s decision is a victory for patients and their doctors — including, I hope, some of the ones in prison for violating the federal legal theory that has now been rejected by the court. The doctors should go free, and Republicans in the White House and Congress should restrain the drug warriors who locked them up. When this year’s budget is drawn up, it’s the D.E.A.’s turn to feel pain.

Tierney rightly excoriates the Bush administration, but in doing so he implicitly suggests that Democrats are somehow better than Republicans when it comes to the rights of Americans to choose their own medical treatment. They are not. Democrats talk a great game when it comes to privacy rights and a woman’s right to control her own body, but those rights exist only as a narrowly conceived defense of the sacrament of abortion. I think this puts it pretty well:

I am all for a general and strong privacy right. I would love to see it Constitutionally enshrined. But liberals (like conservatives, but I am answering Drum’s question) don’t want it. They want to allow women to choose abortions, but not choose breast implants. They want the government to allow marijuana use but squelch fatty foods. They don’t want police checking for terrorists but do want them checking for people not wearing their seat belts. They want freedom of speech, until it criticizes groups to whom they are sympathetic. They want to allow topless dancers but regulate the hell out of how much they make. Liberals, in sum, are at least as bad about wanting to control private, non-coerced individual decision-making as conservatives — they just want to control other aspects of our lives than do conservatives.
Warren Meyer, Coyote Blog

I have seen first hand the disgusting denial of proper pain medication to the terminally ill. It is a bipartisan issue. Both Republicans and Democrats are to blame.

Posted on January 21st, 2006 by pwyll
Filed under: law, politics