Hurwitz Released – Challenge of Drug Misuse
Hurwitz Released – Challenge of Drug Misuse; Alex DeLuca; War on Doctors/Pain Crisis blog of the Pain Relief Network; 2008-10-12.
Permalink: http://doctordeluca.com/wordpress/archive/hurwitz-released/
With Reference to:
The Challenge of Prescription Drug Misuse
Dr. William Hurwitz – Pain Medicine, 6(2), 2005
and to,
Pain Relief Network’s !New! Media Page
A central source of audio and video by or about PRN
I spoke to Billy’s wife briefly, recently, and am very happy to be able to report that Dr. Hurwitz is no longer in federal prison. He is currently in a half-way house in D.C. (To review this most interesting and important War on Docs case, see The Hurwitz Collection, #4 in the War on Pain Sufferers archives.)
He is in a sort of “titration to house arrest” best I understand it.
Meaning, he is starting to get overnight visits with his family – YEA! – and more and more of that till he sort of “stabilizes” on a regimen of maintenance house arrest. (Is house arrest a substitution therapy for real life in the new world order?)
Once the titration is complete, he will be able to communicate freely again, and accept visits by invitation. I think he has a job lined up as part of his probation.
Billy Hurwitz is coming back to us! He is a remarkable man. He wrote The Challenge of Prescription Drug Abuse 1 while being tried for federal drug crimes, and published it whilst in federal detention. This is an excellent analysis of prescription drug abuse trends, and one that creatively draws on multiple government databases, and is one of the best academic papers in this field I’ve ever read. Dr. Hurwitz, the man the government characterized as (paraphrase) “no better than a crack dealer in a white coat,” did the research, crunched the statistics, and produced the work himself, using just his brain and an internet connection. In my opinion, it puts more recent self proclaimed ‘big picture’ academic overviews 2 and the Drug Czar’s yearly statistical butchery, to shame.
Dr. Hurwitz was violently cleaved from his patients by the government, and in that process people died because they couldn’t find another doc to treat them adequately. People who very likely would be alive today had Dr. Hurwitz been allowed to continue caring for them. People like Sean Greenwood, Co-founder of the Pain Relief Network. (See: “The Chilling Effect – Pain Patient’s in the War on Drugs” and also three recent (2008) Siobhan Reynolds videos for more about Sean’s life, death, and the pain relief movement that has emerged, all available on PRN’s new Media Page.
So, to those who took him from his patients and colleagues and family – all of whom really needed him in these years taken from us – may all of you messed up, crazy jerks… hey, just have a really great day, OK?
It’ll be nice to just sit down and talk with the guy for a few hours without armed law enforcement milling about. Sweet.
And there is some good news, as PRN fights back in Kansas in defense of Dr. Schneider and his patients, and in our class-action lawsuit against Washington State around multiple issues related to their 2007 Interagency Guideline on Opioid Dosing for Non-Cancer Pain.
Still, I can’t help but notice how little progress has been made in improving access to high dose opioid therapy for those who need it, in this the Decade of Pain. 3 Rather law enforcement targeted at the doctor-pain patient relationship at both state and federal levels grows ever more aggressive, and our academic leadership continues to legitimize what Billy, in 1997, called The Police State of Medicine, by calling for more of the same strategy that got us exactly here, The Central Principle of Balance. (You think they might have learned something from the Pathological DEA FAQ Debacle, but apparently not.)
Welcome back, Billy.
love, ..alex…
Footnotes
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The Challenge of Prescription Drug Misuse: A Review and Commentary. William Hurwitz; Pain Medicine, 6(2): 152-165; 2005. DOI: 10.1111/j.1526-4637.2005.05024.x Abstract ↩
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For a very recent example: Physicians charged with opioid analgesic-prescribing offenses – Goldenbaum et. al; Pain Medicine, 9(6); 2008. An interesting article, with some useful data, but which is also flawed in fundamental ways. So I am working on a fundamental response to it. -smile- ↩
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Yup, in 2000 Congress passed a (yet another mostly useless) pain relief promotion act, declaring this “The Decade of Pain Control and Research.” I call them “mostly useless” because this sort of legislation invariably avoids dealing with, or ameliorating, the core problem of barriers to access to care. Law enforcement has grown more aggressive over these years (see Footnote #1 – From Table 3: Total = combined state and federal and administrative prescribing cases against physicians rose approximately 760 percent between 2003 and 2006, and most of the increase was in criminal charges), which neither pain legislation nor the article cited in Footnote #2 choose to address. Finally, below the standard of care for pain management treatment is still the norm, especially for those poor souls with severe, chronic pain of non-cancer origin, who also have the misfortune of requiring high doses of opioids in a tragically opiophobic society. In my opinion, “pain relief” legislation mostly serves to cement the status quo of the pain crisis, not change it. ↩
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