Word: deas
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Dates: during 2000-2009
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...DEA, for its part, says it was acting on tips from "several individuals in the community and pharmacies ... regarding suspicious prescriptions," according to a spokesman, who declined to elaborate...
...Baltimore-based American Pain Foundation. "They've gone to every physician within hundreds of miles and can't get someone to prescribe to them," says executive director Will Rowe. In some cases, patients with high-dosage prescriptions are turned away by drug stores, which are also subject to DEA investigations. "It's demeaning," says Mary Vargas, a Maryland attorney whose spine was injured in an auto accident. "Pharmacists tell me they don't have the medication, only to recant and dispense it when I persist with the manager...
That's not how DEA administrator Karen Tandy sees it. "Dr. Hurwitz was no different from a cocaine or heroin dealer peddling poison on the street corner," she told reporters after his sentencing. Prosecutors said Hurwitz prescribed "obscene" amounts of medicine to patients he knew were addicted to cocaine and other drugs. As for the DEA's other investigations and prosecutions, "We're not on a witch hunt," Tandy told TIME. "We are very careful in our investigations. More than 600,000 doctors are registered to prescribe controlled substances. There are a very small number of bad apples." Her agency...
...near doubling of prescription-drug abuse from 1992 to 2003, but because of changes in the way federal statistics were gathered in the past decade, no such claim can be made, the spokesman said. Last month the libertarian Cato Institute issued a report, Treating Doctors as Drug Dealers: The DEA's War on Prescription Painkillers, charging that the agency exaggerated reports of OxyContin deaths and overdoses. Nonsteroidal anti-inflammatory drugs (NSAIDs) like aspirin and ibuprofen, which can lead to intestinal bleeding, cause 35 times more deaths a year than OxyContin, the Cato report contended, and are far less effective...
...DEA's $154 million drug-diversion campaign is also under attack by state officials. In a stinging 10-page critique issued last March, 32 state attorneys general, led by Oklahoma's Drew Edmondson, charged that the agency's proposed criteria for investigations would force severely ill patients to make frequent, unnecessary doctor visits, thus increasing both their hardship and their co-payments. "DEA is creating a climate that ... discourages good practice," they wrote. Tandy met with a delegation of attorneys general in April to reassure them that "the last thing DEA wants to do is to chill the legitimate prescription...