DEA crackdown hurts nursing home residents who need pain drugs

Heightened efforts by the Drug Enforcement Administration to crack down on narcotics abuse are producing a troubling side effect by denying some hospice and elderly patients needed pain medication, according to two Senate Democrats and a coalition of pharmacists and geriatric experts.

Tougher enforcement of the Controlled Substances Act, which tightly restricts the distribution of pain medicines such as morphine and Percocet, is causing pharmacies to balk and is leading to delays in pain relief for those patients and seniors in long-term-care facilities, wrote Sens. Herb Kohl (D-Wis.) and Sheldon Whitehouse (D-R.I.).
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The DEA has sought to prevent drug theft and abuse by staff members in nursing homes, requiring signatures from doctors and an extra layer of approvals when certain pain drugs are ordered for sick patients.
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Most nursing homes do not have pharmacies or doctors on site, adding to delays for patients who fall ill late at night or in transition from a hospital.
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2009/10/28/AR2009102803146.html?hpid=moreheadlines

God forbid that somebody sit down and try to come up with a workable solution. If somebody really tried and put their thinking caps on, they could possibly find a faster way for this to work.

But noooooooooo. Patients have to suffer in their old age and trapped in nursing homes. MEH!

Addicts need a lot of TLC and compassion at times. They also do not need enablers. He has a few hundred thousand of those.

This piece of shit would deny Cancer Patients their drugs and yet he pushes for some kind of Weird Fascist amerika with the cops dea etc having the "Upper Whip Hand".

While Dirty Scumbags like him sail through the waters of Nirvana

He is a greasy gas bag.

They are not like ordinary Americans.

Now call me crazy, but it's probably a little bit more important to make sure nursing home patients get proper pain control than to throw up a few roadblocks to keep the help from stealing pills.

My grandmother spent almost a week in a home at the end of her life, and if somebody had denied her needed medication in a misguided effort to make sure the dishwasher didn't take some with him at the end of his shift, I'd have hit the fucking roof. Patients come first, god damn it.

second that. And let's go ahead and throw the TSA and the DHS out along with them.

An enforcement agency is truly useless when they target the old and sick.
Fuck 'em (MEH)

Better all should hurt rather than one pill go astray.