Today, in America, if you are suffering from certain medical conditions, physicians are being taught that you cannot be trusted or even treated. This results from a decade of law enforcement targeting physicians, pharmacists, and nurse practitioners for making medical judgment calls the police don’t agree with when it comes to the treatment of certain conditions. I use the term “police” here to include federal agencies, knowing that, while policing the populace was left by the founders to the states, that authority has now been fully usurped by the federal government, which is now brazen enough to put it on their jackets. In the famous case of Dr. Thomas Moore (1974), the U.S. Supreme Court said that the Controlled Substances Act could be expanded to include doctors if they acted “no different than a drug dealer.” Most would agree with this sentiment, though I would add that the prosecution should also be left to the states, as only they have the authority to determine the lawful practice of medicine, according to that same Supreme Court.
The U.S. government has strayed so far from that 1974 standard that today, any physician prescribing a single controlled medication to a single patient could be prosecuted under the arguments used in court against one physician or another. Treated someone over the age of 50 (34 percent of the population)? Wrong per the standards applied to Dr. Hinderliter. In the same case (and my case), the DOJ implied that treating those with a criminal conviction was a sign of criminal conduct (33 percent of the adult male population and 21 percent including women). In one case, giving Narcan showed the doctor knew the patient was at high risk of overdose and therefore should have stopped controlled medications, and in another, a doctor not giving Narcan proved they didn’t care if their patient overdosed. If a patient doesn’t have insurance or has one you don’t accept, you must deny them care, or you are “taking cash.” If they live more than 45 miles away, carpool, have an abnormal drug screen, or report the medication is not working as well anymore, the doctor can be prosecuted.
If they are too cheerful (not really in pain) or not cheerful enough (signs of depression construed as psychiatric problems precluding pain treatment), have any history of trauma in their background without the presence of the protective Y chromosome (women), were paid to talk about a medication they prescribed and thought was suitable for patients (Ruan), or any other of hundreds of false metrics used to put several thousand physicians in prison. This is so far divorced from Dr. Moore selling methadone by the milligram and pill count without any physical examination at all or evaluation of records that the U.S. Supreme Court came together in a unanimous decision, unheard of in these divided times, to tell the DOJ, “No, the doctor must have criminal intent.” This preclusion has been almost entirely ignored by federal agents, prosecutors, judges, and even appellate courts under the “should have known or was willfully blind to what we think they should have done” rubric, aided during this distortion of due process by a particular breed of medical “expert.”
You can find these men and women at medical conferences today, pontificating on how the use of opioids distorts the thinking of pain patients to the point that their concerns and statements can be disregarded entirely and their participation excluded from discussions of the subject. These experts, paid in the hundreds of thousands or even millions of dollars, travel the country without bothering to review the state’s medical practice laws, touting a “national standard of medical practice” that, they also intone, exists only in the minds of experts such as themselves, and not in any textbook or database. Taking the stand and raising their right hand (no Bibles anymore, probably due to the fire hazard), they swear to tell the truth. Then, they set about making completely false claims against the physician without any support from rational, evidence-based science. The jury of peers, along with the judge, not having the requisite minimum of four years of medical training, nod their heads and send the doctor to prison for years or even life. All based on false metrics.
Added to this is a new phase. When a government makes a nonsensical claim, it is at first derided and even laughed at or ignored by most professionals who know better. Haul away a few colleagues and gleefully have the media scream their arrest for “overprescribing,” and another reflex kicks in. Very quickly, doctors who intellectually know better start feeling intense fear, and cognitive dissonance asserts itself. It goes something like this: “I know that what the government is saying regarding medical practice is nonsense, but … I also know that Dr. Bauer was hauled away, and he was a compassionate, immensely qualified physician. In his 80s, no less. If they can lock him away for decades, what chance will I have?” And the older unconscious parts of the brain, the ones Jung warned us about, step up, making us feel that, yes, indeed, Dr. Franklin should have known better. Or he must have done something … I mean, they wouldn’t do this without a good reason, would they? And then the Struggle Sessions start, where denunciation becomes a matter of survival.
When humans give in to this response, they don’t usually do it half-heartedly. They take up the torches and march fervently. Repeating the government’s lies with the zeal of the newly converted … A doctor at a teaching conference for the American Society of Addiction Medicine spoke of how one of his patients was dancing and thanking the doctor for stopping his opiates as he threw up from the withdrawals. First, I want to see that patient in the flesh because I have deep concerns that the doctor’s reporting might not be completely accurate. Second, just like the doctors laughingly discussing why they won’t treat women with a history of trauma, I sense a tad of sadism here. Lack of compassion is a common human trait closely related to schadenfreude and is distinct from pathological sadism. I’m talking about true sadism. Some will argue that this is antithetical to the medical community, and I’ll point out that Drs. Oberheuser, Gebhardt, Brack, and both Brandts were convicted at Nuremberg, as well as Ishii et al. in Unit 731 from the Empire of Japan.
Those with a truly pathological sadistic bent will immediately see the opportunity during the current opioid panic to exercise their avarice in heinous ways. Belittling deaths by suicide and blaming fentanyl poisonings on the victims instead of where it belongs. The government of the United States of America is solely responsible for the more than one million illicit fentanyl-related deaths that have occurred over the last decade. They failed in their fight against the cartels, with some DEA agents even being convicted of helping those cartels launder their money. Allowing this lawlessness makes the administrators complicit in the crimes. (Knew, should have known, or were willfully blind; remember? RICO?) Next, to deflect from their abject failure in the war on drugs, they distracted the public by attacking and targeting those they thought were “coddling” patients suffering from severe chronic pain and addiction, destroying thousands of doctors’ practices and liberty, and creating an atmosphere of fear where doctors have two choices: be complicit in the crimes or face retribution from a federal police force without effective oversight.
The Office of the Inspector General (OIG) was created with a mandate to oversee federal agency operations. Now, they also go out on these raids. You cannot expect “internal affairs” to effectively police agents’ crimes when they were in on the operation from the start. They would be investigating themselves—something the OIG was explicitly created to avoid. Millions of these now-abandoned patients cannot find effective treatment and, in their agony, are effectively funneled into the waiting arms of the cartel dealer, whose fentanyl- and xylazine-laced fake tablets are effectively a roulette wheel of death. Many medical and science experts have recognized the government’s flawed reasoning and spoken out. But many others embrace the new party line and, in a fit of self-criticism, what the Soviets called Критика и самокритика, agree with the DEA’s argument that doctors caused the opioid crisis. This is cult-think, and I’ve seen it before.
I was raised in a fundamentalist Seventh-Day Adventist farming community in rural Arkansas. There, hardworking and dedicated people spent their lives eking out a meager living on a few acres six days a week. But from sundown Friday to sundown Saturday, it was the Lord’s day, and they spent it studying the Bible at church or in their homes or, quite often, in the tent revivals always coming through. I would be taken to these meetings by my mom and stepdad, and I would listen to the prophecies of imminent doom and how we could be saved if we would just listen to the right authority. Here, I would also hear the anecdotal tales of someone coming across government plans to put the number 666 on all the Social Security checks and how the Time of Troubles was nigh. Terrifying to a young boy. It was during one of these that I heard about a wonderful place in Texas called Mount Carmel, being run by a man named Roden. I know now that this was Benjamin Roden, and, like Ellen G. White, he was seen as a prophet by some in the SDA community.
Roden ran Mount Carmel from about 1962 to 1978, which would have been the time that I am remembering. He preached a return to biblical principles, strict observance of the Sabbath, holistic living, and a healthy diet. Many Seventh-Day Adventists are vegetarian; indeed, my brother has never eaten meat in his life and gets ill at the thought. Roden also taught that the end of man’s reign on Earth was near and that we should prepare for the end times. Whatever your thoughts on the matter, by all accounts, they kept to themselves and harmed no one. I have since learned that when he died, his wife, Lois, took over, publishing a magazine called Shekinah to proselytize their beliefs, and after her death came their son, George. George’s leadership was, however, contested by some in the community, who had been swayed by the persuasive preachings of a young, charismatic man who eventually came also to be called a prophet by some. Trained to follow authority unquestioningly, adherents of the Rodens now followed this new leader just as fervently.
We all know what happened at that compound in 1993. I remember it like it was yesterday, as the name Mount Carmel resonates in my mind, dredging up these old memories. Many of the followers of that young charismatic leader who named himself Koresh did indeed experience their own personal end times when the federal government chose to act exactly like what these people feared the most: a tyrannical, unaccountable force bent on their destruction. The two groups were much more alike than they would care to admit. But is there no middle ground in the practice of medicine? Can we not draw a line somewhere short of blindly following authority? Can we not step back and evaluate what we are being told to ascertain what is true and what is false? Are we not allowed as physicians to treat every human being who comes to us with compassion and mercy? Must we despise them and refuse them effective care, as the DEA mandates? Or can we have this last bit of liberty left to us? To be treated with kindness and respect as patients and physicians?
There is not much from those childhood days that I still have faith in. Walks through pediatric cancer wards have disabused me of absolute belief in some all-merciful divine presence. And while I no longer hold to any belief in a divinely revealed text from any organized religion or cult, I have tried to hold on to the best of what I was taught, letting go of the rest. “Cult” is just what we call a new faith anyway, until it can afford to gain enough influence or pay off the right politicians. The Roman gods were pagan to the Greeks, and the followers of Jesus were terrorists to the Romans. Upon Rome’s conversion, the only thing that changed was who was called heretic and who was called saint. But I have, over all this time, still managed to hold on to what I believe was true from those teachings: that when we are most convinced of our righteousness is when we are in the greatest danger, and this is when we need to reassess and be certain that we are not following a false doctrine. Of all the verses I had to memorize as a child and have forgotten now, one still speaks to me:
“Prove all things; hold fast that which is good.”
— 1 Thessalonians 5:21
L. Joseph Parker is a research physician.
