Appointment With Dr. Feelscared

By Maia Szalavitz, Reason. Posted September 7, 2004.

On Feb. 1, 2002, Cecil Knox was seeing patients in his Roanoke, Virginia, clinic when more than a dozen federal agents burst through the doors with guns drawn. Helmeted, shielded, and wearing bullet-proof vests, they terrified waiting patients and employees. One worker later told the Pain Relief Network, a patient advocacy group, she thought she and her husband, who was helping her in the office that day, would be shot. She looked on in horror as an agent put a gun to her husband's head and ordered, "Get off the phone! Now!"

Knox, a pain management specialist who had been practicing medicine in Roanoke for seven years, was dragged out in handcuffs and leg irons. The local U.S. attorney's wife, a TV reporter, was among the journalists tipped about the raid in advance. She stood outside with a gaggle of other media people to announce her husband's triumph. Knox's assets were frozen and bond set at $200,000.

He and several employees soon faced a 313-count indictment, including charges of drug distribution resulting in death or serious bodily injury, prescription of drugs without a medical purpose, conspiracy, mail fraud, and health care fraud. Prosecutors said Knox had illegally distributed millions of dollars' worth of OxyContin, a timed-release version of the narcotic painkiller oxycodone.

William Hurwitz, a McLean, Virginia internist and prominent pain specialist, received similarly heavy-handed treatment when he was arrested last fall. Hurwitz, who is Jewish, was visiting his children on Rosh Hashanah eve when federal agents descended upon his ex-wife's house in McLean and took him away in handcuffs. As with Knox, the government froze Hurwitz's assets; his bail was set at $2 million. He was charged with 49 felony counts, including drug trafficking resulting in death or serious injury, conspiracy and running a criminal enterprise.

Like Knox, Hurwitz attracted attention largely because of his OxyContin prescriptions. Attorney General John Ashcroft said "the indictment and arrests in Virginia demonstrate our commitment to bring to justice all those who traffic in this very dangerous drug." Prosecutors said Hurwitz was "no better than a street corner crack dealer" who "dispenses misery and death." Assistant U.S. Attorney Gene Rossi had earlier declared that the feds would "root out" such doctors "like the Taliban."

Knox and Hurwitz are just two recent targets of an aggressive push by the Drug Enforcement Administration (DEA) and the Department of Justice (DOJ) to impose their judgments about the proper use of opioid painkillers (drugs derived from opium and synthetics that resemble them) on doctors throughout the country. In their attempt to prevent prescription drug abuse, the DEA and the DOJ in effect have taken upon themselves the authority to regulate the practice of medicine, traditionally the province of the states. Worse, they have transformed disagreements about treatment decisions into criminal prosecutions, scaring physicians away from opioids and compounding the suffering of patients who have trouble getting the drugs they need to relieve their pain.

Drug Control vs. Pain Control

Few disagree that pain is already poorly treated in the U.S.

"Even the DEA admits that 30 to 50 million people are undertreated for pain," says Ronald Libby, a professor of political science at the University of North Florida who has studied the issue. A 1999 survey of 805 chronic pain patients conducted by Roper Starch for the American Pain Society and Jannsen Pharmaceutica found that roughly half of those with serious chronic pain could not find relief – and that the more severe the pain, the less likely it was to be alleviated.

Other surveys have yielded similar results. Only a tiny fraction of the nation's nearly 1 million health care professionals licensed to prescribe controlled substances are willing to consistently use opioid medications, recognized as the best drugs for severe pain. A 2003 analysis by the Ft. Lauderdale Sun-Sentinel found that less than 3 percent of Florida's doctors prescribed the majority of opioids for Medicaid patients there.

During the 1990s, pain experts, patient advocates and drug makers sought to reduce exaggerated fears about opioids and increase prescribing. Research and clinical experience had shown that few patients without a prior history of serious drug abuse get hooked on narcotics during pain treatment, resulting in addiction rates no higher than those seen in the general population.

In one important study, reported in the journal Pain in 1982, the researchers surveyed 181 staffers of 93 burn units who had seen more than 10,000 patients and worked in the field an average of six years. Most patients had been given opioids to cope with agonizing debridement treatments, but the staff could recall no cases of addiction in anyone without a prior history of it. A study of 100 people taking opioids for chronic pain over prolonged periods, reported in the Journal of Pain and Symptom Management in 1992, likewise found that none became addicted.

No new evidence has contradicted this research, and a study of prescribing from 1990 to 1996, published in 2000 in The Journal of the American Medical Association, found that massive increases in the use of particular opioids were not associated with proportional increases in misuse; in fact, as use of some medications rose, emergency room "mentions" of them dropped.

Maia Szalavitz is a senior fellow at the media watchdog group STATS.

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