PHARMACIST STEVE

“give me the man, and I will find the crime [for him]”

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Give_me_the_man_and_I_will_give_you_the_case_against_him

In Poland, the saying is associated with the criticism of the justice system under totalitarian (in particular, communist) regimes.^{[2][18][19]: 7 [7]: 179 [10]} The saying has been described as “one of the most popular, depressing and representative sayings about the general powerlessness of people faced with unjust legal systems, characteristic to all countries governed by the communists”.^[19]: 7

Such abuse of power, exemplified by this saying, has been explicitly discussed in the context of military justice in the Stalinist era in Poland (1948–1956), particularly concerning the court’s ability to determine the legal classifications of the defendant’s actions, based on very vague and generic legal terminology. During that time, in several cases, the courts considered multiple competing classifications and often sided with the prosecution in defaulting to the one that would invoke the harshest punishments.^{[20]: 269–271}

The expression is widely used in Putin-era modern Russia to describe the fabrication of criminal cases by police and judges.

Newly released documents show that the US Federal Government has allowed insurance companies and unvetted AIs to target physicians who treat pain and addiction for prosecution. As crazy as this sounds, in 2017, Attorney General Jeff Sessions became convinced that the opioid crisis was not the fault of cartels smuggling fentanyl across porous American checkpoints. And it wasn’t due to pharmaceutical companies corrupting drug approval officials and DEA administrators by hiring them as consultants after making decisions in the company’s favor. No. The opioid crisis was caused by American physicians coddling pain patients and addicts. But reviewing all the actions of tens of thousands of physicians would take literally hundreds of years and thousands of agents, so the government paid for the development of a secret weapon. It hired a private company to create a new Artificial Intelligence that would be trained to look for actions taken by physicians that the DEA deemed “illegitimate.” The theory was that artificial intelligence-enforced precrime predictive models would provide a focused criminal deterrence in the practice of medicine. There is a strong incentive in this industry to err on the side of labeling activity as illegal; indeed, “bounties” can be paid to persons and companies identifying FWA. This company’s main selling point was the use of innovative data analysis, including data mining and predictive analytics, to identify patterns and improve operational efficiencies. “Dynamic Dashboards” were created to focus on what the AI programmers perceived to be criminal behavior. AI decision-making is only as good as the data and parameters it is fed. Insurance companies told the AI that many treatments were “medically unnecessary” and, therefore, indicative of fraud. The DEA then provided its interpretation of actions it thought showed criminal medical practice, including the number of patients seen and prescriptions written per month, particularly the number of Schedule II prescriptions. The distance a patient drove, whether or not the doctor’s office accepted cash payments, and the prescribing of a “trinity” of drugs, including a narcotic with a sedative, muscle relaxer, or even, amazingly, an antibiotic. These were all seen as indicative of criminal behavior. Ignoring the fact that medical textbooks, continuing medical education (CME), and evidence-based practice say otherwise. The CDC says that treatment for pain can continue even if a patient has been diagnosed with addiction. “Although identification of an opioid use disorder can alter the expected benefits and risks of opioid therapy for pain, patients with co-occurring pain and opioid use disorder require ongoing pain management that maximizes benefits relative to risks.” The AI also uses claims, encounters, pharmacy invoices, beneficiary enrollment files, state licensing board information, property records of targeted healthcare physicians, ownership/asset and financial filings of targeted healthcare physicians, and court records, as well as other custom data in its decision-making algorithm. Chief Executive Officer Ronald G. Forsythe said, “We have combined the book smarts’ of AI and our analysts with the “street smarts” of our investigators to create one beast of a program integrity tool. Unleash the beast!” And unleash it they did, becoming, in effect, a private police force. Physicians began to see their colleague’s clinic doors kicked down and watched as these doctors were pilloried in the media for prescribing “Millions” of morphine milligram dose equivalents!” which would then be conflated with millions of pills. No matter that this was a number accumulated over several years to sometimes thousands of patients and that palliative, cancer, sickle cell, and HIV/AIDs patients had not been excluded from the numbers. Once in court, “experts” cherry-picked by the prosecutors for their extreme views made conviction easy. How can we expect randomly chosen lay people without the benefit of any medical education to sort this out? Doctors were convicted by the thousands, and tens of thousands of pain and addiction patients could not find a physician anywhere who was brave enough to treat them. These patients were at extreme risk of either killing themselves, as many did, or going to the streets to try to buy their regular pain medications. Finding instead, fake hydrocodone and oxycodone tablets were laced with fentanyl, and they died by the thousands. American citizens have the right to receive compassionate and evidence-based healthcare, and physicians have the right to treat their patients in accordance with their education, training, and experience, without being prosecuted for violating the opinions of some healthcare executive or DEA agent. No matter what the AI “beast” says.

Filed under: General Problems