This is a very serious issue. As a chronic pain patient, I have all too often been treated like a street addict due to my requirement of narcotic analgesic treatment for my pain. For the past several years I have been enrolled at a pain management clinic in their methadone program which affords me excellent pain relief on a reliable and constant basis. But there are many people who are not as fortunate as I am, and have to suffer needlessly with their pain because doctor's who want to help them cannot due to the overzealous DEA agents the Bush administration has instructed to crack down on physicians prescribing narcotic analgesics.

This is not to say that there are no unscrupulous doctor's out there, who make money illegally selling prescriptions. But they are in vast minority of the millions of honest doctors whose only concerns are their patients well being. Patients should never be made to feel as if being sick is a crime and their docs should be able to help them.