But one of these professional patients, a former cop from upstate New York who had been pulverized by a school bus, upped the ante.  He warned the board that if they lifted Hurwitz’s license and cut off his prescription, he would kill himself.

The board was sympathetic but there were larger issues involved. Doctor Hurwitz was clearly prescribing narcotics in amounts that far exceeded the norm.  If this was sound medical practice, then why was he the only one doing it? The board had a statutory duty to protect society at large from this kind of recklessness, and they found Hurwitz guilty of overprescribing and revoked his license. Four weeks later, as promised, the former police officer committed suicide, but first he made a video and Ed Bradley ran it on the air.

“It’s pretty damn stupid that the only person I can get to help me, they turn around and take his license away from him.

“Suicide was not what I wanted.  Pain treatment and control is what I wanted.”

When Bradley played this tape for the medical examiners they were unmoved. “Tragic as this is,” said one, “the Virginia Board of Medicine may have saved other lives by this action.”^[5]  In other words, a greater good may have been served by making sure these powerful narcotics did not somehow fall into the hands of young people. But as is so often the case in this conflict, the message sent was not necessarily the one received. Any teenager watching the 60 Minutes broadcast would probably have come away with the clear understanding that this was a society willing to torture its citizens to prove a point.

Regardless of what else may happen in the drug war, pain control is one front that is almost certainly headed for a change.  The Baby Boomers are coming up on 60, and as this enormous wave of humanity starts getting liver cancer, they will dramatically alter pain treatment as they have transformed everything else in their path.

And this may be the central problem for the prohibitionists in the coming debate. The seamless propaganda campaign that has blanketed the drug war for 80 years has always had as its