Saturday, October 31, 2015

Conviction of Doctor Who Ran a Pill Mill (i.e. fast prescriptions with no questions)

The California doctor who was prescribing heavy pain medications (i.e. Oxycontin or 'hillbilly heroin') has been convicted of one murder and likely others will follow.

We do not see this as a political matter because the wholesale prescription drug abuse affects everyone.

While we have no problem if the other convicts serve up the doctor for their evening meal, we don't believe the problem is defined solely by some small percentage of doctors which throws out ethics for the money.  Presumably they weren't particularly competent and this was their Plan B.


For the abuse to be possible, Big Pharma must be manufacturing tremendous oversupplies of these pain-killer or psychoactive narcotics ... or ... they are being manufactured by clandestine labs.  It's not clear which is the source, which is the worst, etc, etc.


A crackdown on this pill-pushing is possible if we do something no-one wants to do:  doctor prescriptions are validated at a central database which keeps track of what individuals are taking.  That solution is the complete 1984 package but it remains as a potential solution if nothing else works.

(Ed:  if the Fed registers prescriptions then the pill-pushing doctor can write the script without notifying the Feds.)

Exactly.  So that means you need all the pharmacies doing the same thing so the pill request gets a second level of validation.

That makes a grand package of a large part of your medical history in Fed hands.  Likely they already have it anyway but that makes it official.


The individual plan is addressing the ethics of doctors and crushing them when they fail that standard.  As we saw with Michael Jackson's doctor and his prescriptions, he was busted for it but nothing much came of it.


The object isn't to illustrate the bleakness but rather these are problems to be solved and talking with the Mystery Lady revealed her concern about the staggering abuse of hard drugs.

We're old-style sixties freaks and almost all of us were stoners, some still are (i.e. me).  At first I felt deep guilt that I could have contributed to this wave of prescription downers and illegal narcotics but we're really not sure what did it.  There has been so much campaigning against cigarettes and the decreases in smoking have been impressive ... but still kids do it even after telling them everything we learned.  Therefore, the guilt subsides but a tremendous disappointment remains regarding some failure and we're not even really sure what it was.

What I do know is there are substantive steps we can take toward dealing with the problem and preventing more of this soul-killing addiction.  Stoners don't want this and we never did but something pushes people to get into drugs they know and have been told will destroy them.


Therefore, the proposal is to limit supply.  We can't have the Fed looking at our medical activities because there's a fundamental right to privacy when dealing with doctors, preachers, etc and that goes back, well, to the start of Time, most likely.  However, something we can do is monitor the overall hard drug prescription levels at the manufacturere level and cross-reference to what was legally sold, something of that nature.  From that we glean the actual requirement and put a thumbscrew down on any outfit exceeding it.

The question remains about manufacture in clandestine labs and that's true for meth but we're not sure if Oxycontin, etc is so easy to make.  The downer drugs aren't as obviously destructive as meth and they draw different people because the meth people are trying to light up and the downer people are trying to turn off.  So, we're not clear on how much of these prescription drugs comes from illicit manufacture.

2 comments:

Anonymous said...

When Drs refuse to honor the oath they took to become a Dr, it all breaks down.
The government cant not effectively limit the number of pills that a patient receives.
They will use multiple Drs and Pharmacies
Or change a digit in thier SSN to hide.
Or the Dr will cgange that number
But prosecuting for murder may send the message to be an honest Dr that actually wants to heal patients.

Unknown said...

Yep, no-one wants Fed involvement, looking over your shoulder, blah, blah. I do think something needs to be done to curtail over-production, tho. Do you know if illicit manufacture creates much of the supply??

I definitely want pill mill doctors up on charge and murder is accurate. In other words, hang the bitch.