Thirty days after the earth-shaking vote from the Western frontier, Americans were treated to another unsettling dispatch from the front lines of the drug war. Once again it was Ed Bradley in the trenches, reporting from Virginia for CBS.

“Imagine living every day in excruciating pain. Then imagine there was a simple treatment to relieve that pain, but your doctor wouldn’t give it to you.”^[1]

Bradley was focusing the 60 Minutes spotlight on one of the saddest byproducts of the drug war—people who legitimately need narcotic painkillers and find it almost impossible to get them. Since the early 1920s the medical profession in the U.S. has been so terrorized by federal drug agents that they have virtually abandoned patients with chronic pain.  These people—victims of accidents, botched surgery, degenerative disease—sometimes require massive doses of drugs like morphine just to get out of bed. Patients who take narcotics for pain generally don’t get high. The opiates just put the pain at a distance and cancel the fear that often accompanies this kind of ongoing