Shasta is good at going thru reams of printed material and condensing the information down. She works with facts, I have been a student of our bureaucracy for 30 + yrs… I read what they put to print… but.. often it is what is “between the lines”… I listen to what they say… but.. often it is more important in what they DON’T SAY. There is some 2 million federal employees … most we will never hear their name, never see their face, but they are working in the “background” and ” off the radar”. The primary function of a bureaucrat and the bureaucracy is to perpetuate and grow the bureaucracy.
The DEA started with 1200 employees in 1973… today they have over 12,000 employees and it is claimed that > 50% work at a desk. The question has to be asked… how do you arrest members of the various cartels … sitting at a desk ?
The CDC opiate dosing guidelines seem to be a just a mid-way point in a much longer battle/goal…. I have been talking about civil rights violations under American with Disability Act and Civil Rights Act for several years…
All of this may have started about TWENTY YEARS AGO… when Congress passed a law “Decade of pain” that started in early 2000. Healthcare professionals were told it was mandatory to treat pain as a 5th vital sign. The Joint Commission (JC) jumped on this with both feet, which meant that all the hospitals – nearly 100% – had to make sure that pt’s pain management was taken seriously and JC made it a MAJOR STANDARD… meaning if a hospital failed to meet this standard … they risked losing their accreditation… which is necessary for hospitals to have “deemed status” and able to bill for services provided to Medicare/Medicaid pts… typically about 70%+ of a hospital revenue.
I am sure than a large number of con artists got controlled substances from well meaning prescribers and a lot from prescribers who were not so well meaning, but was more focused on the money they could generate.
This “decade of pain law” expired as a new President was just coming to office… Bush (43) was “tapped out”… in 2009 we were going to get a NEW PRESIDENT. Was it a coincident that we had a new Democratic President and a Democratic controlled Congress and in 12 months the decade of pain law was to expire. The Congress did not renew that law and Obama signed “Obamacare” into law a few months later.
Was the decade of pain law a “set up” for the idea that prescribed opiates causes a lot of addictions ? We know that we have 30-40 million people addicted to the two drugs alcohol and Nicotine.. could it be that we really have a untreated mental health epidemic and substance abuse and this decade of pain law and careless prescribing and prescribing driven by prescriber’s greed.
We have to remember that Congress is generally 40% attorneys and Congress created the controlled substance act and assigned this law to be handled by law enforcement and the only tool that law enforcement has to deal with the mental health issues of substance abuse is jail/prison. The Obama administration was headed by a “trinity” of attorneys – Obama, Biden & Holder. Biden graduated 5 yrs before the Controlled Substance Act and the other two afterwards… but the “brainwashing” of everyone dealing with controlled substances, back in the early 70’s and going forward was pretty intense back then.
Tom Frieden the then head of the CDC and Kolondy were coworkers in their younger years and it has been reported that Kolondy first took this “opiate dosing guidelines” to the FDA and reportedly told him to “get lost”… Frieden, probably expected that he would be replaced with a new administration coming into power in 2017. Was he trying to help a old friend, or just trying to “make his mark” before he left ?
Chronic painers and substance abusers have a few things in common, both are dealing with a disease/illness – one if physical and other other is mental health. As Shasta pointed out, “they” are just trying to make the chronic painers functional… and… that is the same things that they are trying to do with substance abusers… If they are successful, a couple of things could happen… all of these people could get back into the work force and start paying taxes – getting off Medicare/Medicaid rolls and the cost of their health issues will be pushed onto their employers’ health insurance costs and the private insurance industry and SS & Medicare starts getting an increased inflow of money.
A lot of dollars are going to be moved from the bureaucracy’s balance sheet and on to the profit and loss statement of public businesses.
Just have to follow the money trail ?
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