Just look at the collusion between the DEA and CDC in punishing doctors who care for chronic pain patients. I know people who were sent home with tylenol after having a leg amputation. I know to many people (women mostly) who are sent home from intensive surgery with little to no pain relief. Despite opioid use rising, prescribing is lowering. There has never been any proof that prescription painkillers were the problem. Yet, the DEA continues to go after doctors that actually care about their patients pain. I forsee that being the loophole to get unpaid professional work.

https://reason.com/2006/06/02/the-doctor-wasnt-cruel-enough/

"They showed addictionology for the sham science that it is," says Reynolds, explaining that in previous cases, the defense often had a hard time getting the jury to see that medications can't "make" people into addicts and that no one, addicted or otherwise, benefits from a system where doctors presume all pain is faked.

"The government position is that the doctor wasn't cruel enough," she adds, describing how hard it was for previous defense teams to debunk the notion that addiction can be prevented or treated by stopping or failing to prescribe pain medication.

"By making the pain patients real, we made the good guys and the bad guys change places—and that's hard to do," she says.

Last week, Heberle was found not guilty on all charges. Unfortunately, at least one patient did not live to see the verdict— she had committed suicide, unable to find another doctor to prescribe the medications she needed. And Heberle, like Fisher, will no longer practice medicine, leaving many patients still without help.

As Reynolds asks, "How can they call this protecting the public health?" We hope the Heberle case is the beginning of the end of these senseless prosecutions.

Unfortunately, that was in 2006 and nothing seems to have changed.

https://www.painnewsnetwork.org/stories/2018/4/2/doctors-and-pharmacists-arrested-in-dea-surge

The DEA surge is the latest in a series of steps taken by Attorney General Jeff Sessions to crackdown on opioid prescribing. Last August, Sessions ordered the formation of a new data analysis team, the Opioid Fraud and Abuse Detection Unit, to focus solely on opioid-related health care fraud.

Sessions also assigned a dozen prosecutors to “hot spots” around the country where opioid addiction is common. Last week the DEA said it would add 250 investigators to a task force assisting in those investigations.

Although overdose deaths are primarily caused by illicit drugs such as fentanyl, heroin and cocaine, federal law enforcement efforts appear focused on opioid prescribing. Doctors and pharmacists are easier to target because they are already in DEA databases, as opposed to drug dealers and smugglers operating in the black market.

As PNN has reported, the data mining of opioid prescriptions -- without examining the full context of who the medications were written for or why – can be problematic and misleading.

For example, last year the DEA raided the offices of Dr. Forest Tennant, a prominent California pain physician, because he had “very suspicious prescribing patterns.” Tennant only treated intractable pain patients, many from out-of-state, and often prescribed high doses of opioids because of their chronically poor health -- important facts that were omitted or ignored by DEA investigators.

That was in 2018 and nothing has changed despite these facts being the exact same for nearly a decade.

https://www.cleveland.com/news/2020/07/charges-against-pain-doctor-reveal-undercurrent-of-anger-angst-among-patients-at-federal-government.html

Since 2017, more than 450 doctors and medical personnel across the country have been accused of opioid-related charges, according to the U.S. Justice Department and published reports.

But in recent months, there has been a growing undercurrent of resistance. Patients have questioned the government's motives on social media.

In court documents and interviews, lawyers for doctors said the government has focused on independent physicians who specialize in pain management.

They claimed that prosecutors and the U.S. Drug Enforcement Administration based their cases solely on the number of prescriptions that doctors have written. They said that many pain-management specialists are often the sole treatment option in communities, drawing hundreds of patients in need of help.

"Prosecutors nationwide are unfairly targeting physicians – particularly pain-management physicians – for criminal prosecution," said Richard Blake, a former federal prosecutor in Cleveland who now represents doctors and medical companies.

"For more than 20 years, government regulators, medical boards and hospitals instructed these doctors to lower patient pain levels and evaluated them on this criteria. The government is now holding physicians to a more conservative 'post-opioid crisis' standard for medical decisions made years earlier."

Same article shows them going after doctors who are critical of the DEA's interference.

Gibbons and Stifel wrote that Bauer was targeted not because of his work as a doctor, but because he has attacked the DEA and regulators for years.

"Dr. Bauer has been a long-standing, vocal critic of interference in the physician-patient relations by the DEA, by the 'War on Drugs/Opioids,' by the insurance industry and by Big Pharma," the attorneys said in documents.

After the charges were filed in August, Bauer spoke to the Sandusky Register in a broadcast interview. In it, he blasted government interference in a patient-doctor relationship.

“What bothers me is that I stuck around in this because I loved to help patients,” Bauer told the paper. “I can’t stand to see this happen to them.”