This week's New Republic Online trashes John Tierney for being "boring" and "utterly predictable" because of his libertarian politics. It bemoans the fact that he has done seven recent columns "lamenting" the war on drugs.
What it does not mention is that he has been the only columnist -- liberal or conservative -- to repeatedly take on the government's war on pain medicine. In five different columns (more than half of his so-called boring coverage of the drug war), he has been the only major columnist to consistently take the side of America's 50 million chronic pain patients.
Two columns explored the case of Richard Paey, an Ivy-league educated attorney and father of three, currently serving a 25 year term in a Florida prison. Paey was convicted of "drug trafficking" because he had in his possession more than 28 grams of pain medication.
Despite the fact that he is in a wheelchair and suffers both MS and a devastating back injury exacerbated by surgical malpractice, despite the fact that he'd legitimately received the same amount of medication from his physician previously, despite the fact that several months of surveillance never showed him selling the medication, he was convicted. And now, in prison, he receives a larger dose of morphine via a spinal implant than was contained in the medications he supposedly "trafficked."
60 Minutes devoted a significant segment to the case. But to the New Republic, the fact that you can go to jail for possessing your own necessary pain medication is boring.
Another Tierney column examined the case of Dr. Bernard Rottschafer. He was convicted of illegally trading sex for drugs based on perjured testimony. One of the witnesses against him couldn't say whether or not he was circumcised. Another admitted to her boyfriend in a series of letters that she had lied under oath to reduce her own sentence: "They're saying he was bribing patients with sex for pills,'' she wrote [referring to Rottschafer], ''but it never happened to me. D.E.A. said they will cut my time for good testimony. I don't want to be a snitch but what should I do?''
As Tierney noted, the prosecution claimed that she was simply trying to deny infidelity to her boyfriend. But they didn't mention that in another letter, she'd admitted, with no plausible reason to lie, that she'd had sex with another man for $50.
Outraged pain activist Siobhan Reynolds, director of the Pain Relief Network asks, "The government is concocting show trials based on the testimony of hookers and that's boring?"
Tierney was also one of the few journalists to report on how the Supreme Court decision in Oregon v. Gonzales, mostly covered as a case about assisted suicide, actually has important implications for pain medicine. As I noted here, the government has been prosecuting dozens of pain doctors based on the idea that the Justice Department has the right to determine what doses of medication are "legitimate" under the Controlled Substances Act.
But in fact, that act does not allow the federal government to set medical standards -- and the Supreme Court affirmed this by saying that the Attorney General could not ban assisted suicide in Oregon by unilaterally declaring that the use of controlled substances to aid dying is not "legitimate."
The CSA only allows the feds to prosecute physicians who act as drug dealers and trade drugs for sex or sell them rather than treating pain. If a doctor believes he's treating pain and he uses doses that are too high, that may be medical malpractice, but it is not supposed to be a crime. Tierney is one of the few journalists to understand how pain medicine is under siege and to report accurately on it.
This issue needs more -- not less -- attention and it is certainly not boring to people who are doomed to their beds and frequently consider suicide because they cannot get the medication they need to function. In the New Republic article, Noam Schieber admits at the end of the piece that the drug war "deserves every bit of scorn Tierney heaps on it."
But liberals should be ashamed that the only people who consistently cover the pain story are libertarians -- and liberal magazines should be covering it themselves, not attacking those who do for being "boring."