| The interaction among prescription drugs, medicine and the law is an intricate one, involving patients, doctors, government officials and drug representatives with ties to advocacy and professional organizations, and regulatory. Recent events, such as increasing rates of prescription drug abuse and overdose deaths and physician prosecutions, have intensified the conflict. This project, a series of news articles, examines the relationship between policy, pain and prescription drugs with perspectives from the fields of law enforcement, public health and medicine. It serves as a remedy to medical journalism that has largely been unwilling or unable to tease out the nuances of this complex relationship. The project considers the ways that health and law enforcement institutions reconcile drugs that are critical in the treatment of pain, but also subject to widespread abuse. It seeks to answer the question: How does the complex relationship among prescription drugs, law enforcement and medicine affect the practice of pain and addiction medicine and the regulation of opioid drugs?... |
