By Marcos E. Hasbun
With prescription drug abuse fast becoming one of the foremost fronts in America’s war on drugs, physicians now find themselves in the crosshairs.
The government is targeting physicians it believes are prescribing narcotics inappropriately, using the same methods once reserved for street corner drug dealers and their suppliers. One common tactic is to send undercover law enforcement agents, who normally pose as drug dealers looking to consummate a street transaction, into a medical practice to pose as a patient seeking relief from pain or anxiety. The penalties for a physician charged and convicted of dispensing a controlled substance without a legitimate basis for doing so are just as severe as those imposed on corner dealers.
In the Tampa area, for example, the state subjected pain-management specialist John Mubang to such a sting operation earlier this year, but his prosecution resulted in a mistrial when the government could persuade only one juror out of six to convict him. Did the state overreach?
Perhaps. But the government is responding to genuinely alarming statistics on prescription drug abuse. From 1999 through 2006, the number of fatal poisonings involving opioid analgesics more than tripled to 13,800. And, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, approximately one in five US high school students has taken a prescription drug without a doctor’s prescription. In fact, prescription drugs are now the second-most commonly abused category of drugs — following only marijuana, and well ahead of the other usual suspects like cocaine, heroin, and methamphetamines.
Physicians are in a tough spot, ethically obligated to do what they can to relieve patients’ suffering but legally required to try to weed out drug-seekers, and open to criminal prosecution if they fail.
More.
[Source: Physicians Practice]
