PHARMACIST STEVE

Takeaway

• Veterans Administration (VA) hospitals have seen a disturbing trend of veterans committing suicide on hospital property; 17 such suicides took place from October 2017 to November 2018, 7 of them in parking lots, the Washington Post reported.

Details

• • Mental health experts are concerned veterans are taking their lives on VA property as “a desperate form of protest” against a health care system that hasn’t helped them.
  • “These suicides are sentinel events,” said Eric Caine, MD, director of the Injury Control Research Center for Suicide Prevention at the University of Rochester. 
  • “It’s very important for the VA to recognize that the place of a suicide can have great meaning,” he said.
  • The VA started tracking on-campus suicides and attempts in 2017; it stopped 233 attempts since then.
  • The VA now trains parking lot attendants and patrols on suicide intervention.
  • The Post cited cases of veterans who took their own lives after frustrating encounters with the bureaucracy or difficulty getting the mental health care they needed.

Keita Franklin, VA’s executive director for suicide prevention, said the deaths are “beyond frustrating and heartbreaking,” and that local VA facilities must develop good relationships with veterans and their families and check for firearm access.

It would seem that these suicides MAY BE causing some minor changes within the VA system… there seems to be little “over flow” to the general chronic pain community. Two entities that do not seem to be the least bit phased by their otherwise preventable suicides…  Congress and the DEA…  We know that Congress passed the “Decade of pain legislation” https://lifeinpain.org/node/141/  in 2000 and may have contributed the fabricated opiate crisis and did not renew or extend that law when it expired at the end of 10 yrs.  It has also been stated that normally Congress consists of  abt 40% attorneys… part of the same judicial system as the DEA.  What we don’t know is how many closed door meetings between members of Congress and the DEA… We don’t know how much lobbying is done on members of Congress by the DEA.

What we do know is that a untold number of petitions have been created… that untold number of letters, emails, faxes have been sent to members of Congress

What we do know is that there has been numerous parts of the bureaucracy have had proposals that was open for comments from the general public and generally no matter how many comments against what was proposed… for the most part … things are done as they were originally proposed. What we know is that chronic pain pts are being thrown into under/untreated pain by prescribers mis-applying the CDC opiate dosing guidelines and we know that many are committing suicide, but many of their deaths are not being documented as such. 

There is a lot of jobs attached to the fabricated war on drugs.. .which will soon (2020) reach its 50th anniversary and can anyone even believe that any progress has been made ? The budget for this war started at 42 million/yr and is now stated to be 81 billion/yr.

 A few attorneys are starting to pay attention to what is going on and all the damage being done to people in the chronic pain community and the healthcare providers that are attempting to care for them.  Here is one attorney that has filed his first lawsuit against a pain doc who is mandating that pts MUST HAVE ESI to be able to get oral opiates for their pain   https://www.pharmaciststeve.com/?p=28739