Pill mill madness


Williams: Let them
eat aspirin.

Southeast Texas media members have found something to lull them out of the summer doldrums.

Summer can be a slow news time because a definite void is left in the news hole due to schools on hiatus. But the big “pill mill” saga is keeping our media friends hopping like a kangaroo on meth.

Earlier this year, concerned citizens and law enforcement in this corner of Texas had friendly pols such as state Sen. Tommy Williams, R-The Woodlands, and Rep. Mike “Tuffy” Hamilton, R-Mauriceville, pushing legislation that would make it harder for cash-only pain management clinics to write scrips for popular prescription analgesics such as Xanax, Lorcet and Soma.

Yesterday, local and state law officers and DEA agents raided a number of pain clinics around the area, seizing records, reportedly to investigate doctors recklessly and overprescribing those prescriptions which end up used for recreational purposes. Local authorities said they have been investigating these clinics for a long time. But all of a sudden they make a big show of raiding and seizing files. I wonder why?

Could it be because of the media hubbub, which included a well-advertised special report on the pill-mill issue by local TV station KFDM-Channel 6 in Beaumont, Texas. Culminating investigations by cops when the media was about writing about the authorities’ targets have been known to happen. An instance which instantly comes to mind is the Branch Davidian raid by the ATF during the time a series about David Koresh and the Davidians was published by the Waco, Texas, newspaper, a paper of which I once had knowledge.

The Channel 6 special, which I believe will be air again this weekend (One can watch the special “Prescription for Abuse” (sigh) on its Web site.), wasn’t bad. It centered around a local woman whose son died of an overdose of prescription pills to which the young man had been addicted.

After seeing the report, I do see that the situation seems kind of dangerous. But I still have heard little about how tighter restriction on lower tier pain medication might ultimately affect patients who suffer from chronic pain. Although I am afflicted by chronic pain, the restrictions would likely not affect me since I have to go to a Department of Veterans Affairs doctor every month for methadone to control pain.

One disconcerning thought from the Channel 6 special came about when the grieving mother of the OD victim said that a tighter leash should be kept on patients who go “doctor-shopping.” For law enforcement officials to effectively do that would most likely involve cops searching an individual’s medical records willy-nilly. For me, that just wouldn’t fly.

Nonetheless, I was happy to see today that the “Beaumont Enterprise” published a story about legitimate pain clinics along with its story on the latest chapter in the Southeast Texas pill mill saga.

Sometimes the entire story of pill mills gone wild in Southeast Texas seems a little too much hype and not enough fiber. But I certainly can’t fault the media, especially after hearing a discussion this morning on Houston talk radio station KTRH .

Callers to this show were up in the air over media coverage on the four teens who met their end early today when the stolen vehicle in which they were riding struck a parked train. Pardon the phrasing of their demise, but I am on a public library computer which censors certain words being transmitted such as the more generic term for an unexpected instance in which one ceases to live.

Some who called this show said the media slanted their story to make it more about the train while others complained that it wasn’t news for teens to be joyriding.

Having worked in the news profession, I still shake my head over how much the general public think they know about news. As I like to point out, one would hardly respect the opinion of a lay person professing to know about brain surgery if they knew the person giving that opinion was only an eighth-grade graduate (I’m not slamming eighth-graders now). Likewise, we rarely don’t tell mechanics or plumbers their business when they are working for us (some people do, I know, I know, already!). The point is there are many people out there who think they know news when in fact they wouldn’t know legitimate news if it fell out of the sky and turned them into a pile of fine dust.

However, people do know what they like. And that is what media managers need to keep in the back of their minds. Is Paris Hilton news? No, but stories over her jailing is what the reading and viewing public wants. And that is quite unfortunate.

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