Richard “Red” Lawhern is a brilliant, passionate, hardworking nonmedical advocate for pain patients. Listen to this show and you will never look at pain medications in same light. Unlike psychiatric drugs, we both find that opiate and opioid pain medications are often under-prescribed. The under-prescribing of opiates is partly because of the fear of addiction, and partly because drug companies push more expensive drugs that do not work as well and cause more harm. Richard explains how the DEA has intruded into the practice of medicine, setting standards for doctors that are robbing patients of adequate medication coverage for pain, sometimes causing these patients to resort to street drugs with the risk of death by unintentional overdose. Having lost the War Against Drugs, has the DEA attacked a softer target, making a War on Doctors and their Pain Patients? Maybe so.
