The real drug pushers

If there is one thing columnists are aware of, it is this: Very few people will tell you what a great column you’ve written, but if anybody disagrees with your assessments, you can be sure that they will be heard from. With that in mind, let me say that the column written by Wayne Bartley (Traipsing) for the Weekend Edition (The cuckoo’s nest) is easily one of the best he’s ever written. I love the analogy he uses. It fits perfectly. Kudos, sir, kudos.

There are many who think along the same lines as Mr. Bartley. The drug war has seen the U. S. imprison more of its citizens than any country in the world. For exact statistics, you might go to this site: http://www.nytimes.com/2008/04/23/world/americas/23iht-23prison.12253738.html?_r=1. Here, the author of a New York Times article, Adam Liptak, in a piece written in April 2008, looks into the reasons for the burgeoning prison population.

As already stated, one reason for the disproportionate number of prisoners in the U. S. is the war on drugs. Mr. Liptak shows how much that portion of the prison population has increased. In 1980, according to Mr. Liptak, there were a mere 40,000 or so people imprisoned for drug-related offenses. By the time this article was written, that number had increased to around 500,000. One can only suspect that since then, this number has risen significantly.

Society has reacted to this war on drugs in different ways. We have been declared a high use area and our Member of Congress, Harold Rogers, has helped to create UNITE, so-called because it unites every aspect of law enforcement to combat the drug trade.

In almost every area of the U. S., prescription pills in the form of semi-synthetic opiates lead the way in illegal drug use. One reason is exemplified by the case of Purdue Pharma and its drug, Oxycontin. Here is a pain-killer produced to mitigate pain experienced by end-stage cancer patients. But Purdue Pharma’s sales staff told doctors that this extremely potent, highly-addictive, indeed, deadly drug, could be used for, of all things, moderate pain. This drug rates highly with those it has turned into addicts.

Talk about overkill. In fact, if moderate pain is all that a patient is complaining of, no opoid should be needed. Over the counter pain medications, such as Alleve, Advil, Motrin, Arthritis-Strength Tylenol, or any number of generic equivalents, are more than sufficient to handle moderate pain. And none of these medicines are addictive.

At one time, a tactic used to combat illegal drugs was to arrest the local dealers, and use them to get to the higher-ups, those who supplied the neighborhood pusher. If that was being done today, those responsible for fighting the war on drugs might find themselves in the board rooms of the nation’s biggest pharmaceutical companies.

After all, these companies are the ones who push doctors to write prescriptions for their patients’ ailments when it is clearly not needed. And it doesn’t matter how a pill is sold, legally or illegally, the end result is profit for the company that produced it.

Well, if you have stock in these companies, rest easy. Despite the fact that they are pushing their highly-addictive pills, law enforcement isn’t likely to declare them pushers anytime soon.