The DEA began targeting pain doctors in 1999. That’s the year a General Accounting Office report rebuked the DEA for failing to decrease the illegal drug supply, despite a 30-year effort armed with an annual budget of billions of dollars.Shortly after that GAO report, the Department of Justice identified prescription drug abuse as the “primary drug threat to the U.S. population,” and two years later put a plan in place to go after licensed doctors. Prescription drug abuse became a measurable, achievable way for the DEA to justify its budget. A federal prosecutor in Alexandria, Va., told the Washington Post at the time, “Our office will try our best to root out [prescription pain doctors] like the Taliban.”The media gladly assisted. Television and newspaper reporters spun up a maelstrom of coverage on how prescription painkillers such as Oxycontin had become the designer drugs du jour. The Orlando Sentinel published in 2003 what was probably the height of the hysteria with a series called “The Accidental Addict,” about doctors who unknowingly addict their pain patients to opioids. This despite little supportive evidence. After months of criticism from patient advocates who poked gaping holes in the series, the paper finally printed an apology and retraction.But by then, the painkiller myth had been loosed, and local, state and federal officials were collecting trophies (According to Radley Balko). Estimates vary among patient advocates, researchers and the DEA, but between 50 and 300 doctors per year have been brought up on federal charges related to prescribing high doses of narcotics since 2001.According to the Pain Relief Network, many more have been prosecuted at the state and local level. Others have lost their medical licenses, or had their malpractice insurance cancelled. Consequently the number of doctors willing to treat chronic pain has dwindled, and even among those remaining, there’s a growing fear of prosecution, meaning most will err on the side of under-treatment. Under-treating pain can subject those same doctors to malpractice suits from frustrated patients. For doctors, it’s damned if you do, damned if you don’t. Many of them have fled the field altogether.According to the Association of American Physicians and Surgeons (AAPS), the regulation of medical practice through criminal law enforcement is misguided and counterproductive. It says it undercuts the legitimacy of law itself when criminal sanctions are applied where clear norms are difficult to define, and it deprives the medical profession of the experience of the most compassionate, courageous, and innovative physicians, while intimidating the rest into an ineffectual cautious conventionality in their approach to patients with chronic pain. The AAPS urges that the DOJ should cease and desist in its current prosecutions and leave the regulation of medicine to competent state authorities.There are 48 million Americans who suffer from chronic pain. For them, it’s getting more and more difficult to get a prescription for the drugs they need. And they’re turning to ever more desperate measures for relief.For more information, see:"The Police State of Medicine: The War on Doctors." Professor Ronald T. Libbyhttp://www.unf.edu/~rlibby/