CDC to Doctors: Send Your Patients Directly to Heroin Dealers

Yes, that is exactly the consequence of this unbelievably stupid policy.  

We have a heroin epidemic in this country for one reason and one reason only: doctors have been violating their Hippocratic Oaths by refusing to prescribe effective painkillers to patients in chronic pain.  Those desperate patients go to the only place left to find pain relief: heroin dealers.

Kevin Drum:

With opioid painkiller addiction now at epidemic levels, the CDC has finally issued new guidelines for primary care doctors:

The guidelines recommend what many addiction experts have long called for — that doctors first try ibuprofen and aspirin to treat pain, and that opioid treatment for short-term pain last for three days, and rarely longer than seven. That is far less than current practice, in which patients are often given two weeks or a month worth of pills.

The guidelines are meant for primary care doctors, who prescribe about half of all opioids but often have little training in how to use them. They call for patients to be urine tested before getting prescriptions and for doctors to check prescription drug tracking systems to make sure patients are not secretly getting medicine somewhere else. Currently, 49 states have such systems, but only 16 require that doctors use them, according to experts at Brandeis University.

Denying pain relief to people in pain is the one and only thing that created the heroin epidemic. Stopping the torture of people in pain is the only thing that will end it.