Sunday, February 17, 2008

Genocide in America

I am sure after a title like that you are probably asking yourself, what in the hell is he talking about? I love this Country. I am a Viet Nam Veteran. I have never taken the freedoms we have in America for granted, but there are things going on that you almost never here about in the News Media. We have always had our share of things in the past, as a compassionate people, we are not proud of. Usually it is after the fact. Example: The internment of Japanese Americans during World War II, the so-called Insane asylums and things done to these poor people in the name of medicine in the 1940s-1960s. I once had the disgusting opportunity to tour one. Of course, who can forget the movie, "One flew over the Coo-Coo's nest". Actually, it wasn't far off the mark.

I'm sure you are saying O.K., so what has all of this got to do with genocide in present day America. If you knew what I know then you would understand when I say that we are in danger of becoming a "police state" and even now a certain group of people are already having their civil rights trampled on, profiled like comman criminals, accused of being drug addicts, having compassionate doctors raided, jailed and accused of running "pill mills", when in fact all they are guilty of in most cases, are keeping people like me alive.

There is a disease in this country right now that goes virtually ignored, untreated and stigmatized. That disease is Intractable Chronic Pain. I know, the usual reaction is hell, pain is not a disease. A little pain never killed anyone, besides I have been in pain before. If you are one of those people who feels that way, then my best friend, "Jesus Christ" said it best in the Book of Proverbs. "My People Perish for lack of knowledge".


I would say you are uneducated to what is going on at this very minute in this country and so would 72.5 Million other people who are in pain, with 30 million of those just like me, living in severe intractable chronic pain. I have another "news flash" for you. You could become like me in the blink of an eye. Doomed to a life of agony and unbearable pain for the rest of your life.

Once you breach the central nervous system, (spinal cord) in any way my friend, You are in for a life time of agony. It could be an auto accident, motorcycle, a simple fall, playing sports or in my case the results of a surgical procedure gone bad.

If you really want to know some of the things that are happening right now, click on this link http://painreliefnetwork.org/index.html .

I am dieing myself, from 25 years of unrelenting pain, 24 hrs a day, 7 days a week, 365 days a year. You get very little sleep and when you do fall asleep from sheer exhaustion, the pain will wake you up in an hour or two. As I write this blog it is 2:30 A.M. and I will probably go to sleep at 4:00-5:00 in the morning. I do this night after night and usually stop when the pain gets so bad I can no longer concentrate.


While it is true that the death certificate will never say that me or anyone in my situtation died of chronic pain, what usually happens is an organ failure, like a heart attack, stroke, etc. In the last 6 months, my blood pressure has gone from being perfect to extremely high. My doctor said it was from the stress of my body fighting pain. Thousands of people every year simply can fight no longer and take their own lives. My question is what is a person supposed to do when "they don't want to die", but they are in "to much pain to live" ?


So who is to blame for this "silent epidemic" as it is called? Truthfully their is plenty of blame to go around. There is a drug addiction problem in this country from people, most are not in pain, but usually take a number of different drugs at one time to get high, lack of education for not just the general public but doctors and the DEA also. For the present time in history, The GAO (govermental accounting office) issued a report that was highly critical of the DEA and their efforts to stem the flow of illegal narcotics. Then the Bush/Ashcroft/Gonzaliz so called "War on Drug dealers" which has turned out to be a "war on doctors and pain patients"


Of course the Senators and Congressmen who head up these powerful committees like nothing better than to get some cabinet head before them and chew their ass out to look good for the cameras. At the time Asa Hutchison was appointed DEA Czar and under pressure from Congress, started with a big media campaign, deliberately useing a new drug called Oxycontin that was and still is a drug approved by the FDA for the treatment of cancer and severe intractable chronic pain. So now instead of going after the bad guys, the drug smugglers, the short answer is they went after the soft targets. The poor chronic pain patient like myself who has no desire to take anything to get high. Instead we are the targets, and all we want is something to give us a few hours away from the painful, miserable, lonely existance we live. Something about this picture is terribly wrong. Its alright to let someone die just as long as you keep them from getting addicted.