In the fall of 2010 I designed and taught a graduate course called Drugs and Germs in Global History and Empire. The course began in the period just before the European voyages of exploration and ended in the late twentieth century. It followed drugs across oceans and borders from when they became important commodities in the emerging global trade of the early modern period. It also examined social and cultural contexts of and meanings ascribed to drug use by different peoples in different times. In particular, it examined what happens to patterns of use as a drug moves from one social, cultural, and economic setting to another. Drugs of interest included opium, tobacco, chocolate, coffee, and tea in the early modern period as these drugs were used in China, India, Mesoamerica, and Europe. Later readings focused on cocaine trafficking and use in the late nineteenth and twentieth centuries in Latin America and the United States.
Day: June 2, 2011
Abusive Treatment: Drug Prohibition and the Erosion of the Doctor/Patient Relationship
In her third guest post for Points, pain relief activist Siobhan Reynolds traces the unraveling of the doctor-(pain)patient relationship under drug prohibition.
Perhaps the most disturbing consequence of opium prohibition, and the one least talked about in polite company, is the steady degradation of the doctor/patient relationship that has occurred since prohibition’s inception. In poor countries, where opioids are not at all available, physicians speak truthfully to their patients when they tell them that they have nothing with which to relieve their pain. In countries like the United States, where opioid pain medications are ostensibly legal but where physicians have been intimidated into withholding pain treatment, the doctors feign their impotence. There is certainly a great deal of pain relief to be found in opioid medications, and they are stacked on the pharmacist’s shelves. But physicians in the US are jailed – often arrested by SWAT teams, de-licensed and destroyed financially – for treating pain in a manner inconsistent with the opinions of government lawyers and agents. If you ask the physician who refuses to treat pain with opioids if his fear of official attention is the cause of his failure to serve his patient, you will likely meet with something quite different than such a humble confession. Instead, you will hear about how addictive the opioids are, or the doctor will say that their use should be confined to the care of the terminally ill, when addiction is not a concern. And he will extol the virtues of the anti-inflammatory and of psychiatric drugs. He will talk about the miracle of biofeedback and the importance of a positive outlook on life in the treatment of pain.
All of these responses have their place in the treatment of pain after the pain has been medically controlled. But recommending these adjustments as if they replace the pain relief provided by opioids is like telling a woman whose house is burning that a simple glass of water will fix her problem or a diabetic that he must exercise to earn his insulin. To a person in suicidal levels of pain, this kind of dissembling amounts to psychological and physical abuse. And yet this conversation between doctor and patient is par for the course under drug prohibition. It is a refrain patients hear over and over, until they finally stop searching for relief and eventually give up on living all together.
The fundamental truth that confronts anyone concerned with the quality of the doctor/patient relationship under drug prohibition – namely, that doctors have in essence been turned against the interests of their patients – remains almost entirely unacknowledged by the profession as a whole.