Dear Mr. Todd,
I was disappointed to see that you included Dr. Andrew Kolodny, Medical Director of Opioid Policy Research Collaborative at Brandeis University and founder of the Physicians for Responsible for Opioid Prescribing (PROP) as an expert panelist on your discussion about the fentanyl crisis this Sunday morning, July 2, 2023, on Meet the Press. There are several statements made on the show today that require correction. Please note that this is an open letter that appears on my blog, ChronicPainPariah.com
You said “many doctors made us addicts.” Kolodny was allowed to compound this misinformation stating that the opioid crisis was worse in places like Ohio, where prescribing was highest.
In fact this is not true. It is a false narrative perpetuated by people like Kolodny who have financial interests in characterizing doctors who prescribe opioids as drug dealers and their patients who need them for pain control as addicts. In fact, opioid addiction in medical patients is both rare and unpredictable.
Prescribing rates and opioid mortality rose from 1990 to 2010, but prescribing has dropped by 55% since then, even as opioid-related deaths tripled. At least as far back as 2012, opioid deaths have been driven almost entirely by illegal street drugs, not prescriptions.
Even before then, there should be at least some suspicion that there was cause and effect before 2010, because even when abused by “recreational users” opioids dispensed by a pharmacy are significantly safer than street drugs contaminated with illicit fentanyl.
As Red Lawhern, a prolific author on this topic said, “The easy availability of prescriptions diverted to street resellers by pill mills may have contributed to addiction, but addicts are now dying from heroin, methamphetamines,” much of it tainted with illicit fentanyl.
Kolodny went on to say there are 3 groups of addicts: One group of older nonwhite mostly Black men who use heroin and who are dying at high rates because of heroin contaminated with fentanyl, and two other groups of people who became addicted after 1996: those who began with prescription opioids and then switched from prescriptions to heroin, and an older group of middle aged people who are addicted to scripts and who are doing better now because doctors are not prescribing opioids anymore.
Please allow me to disabuse you of the lie that chronic pain patients who can no longer get access to pain medication are doing better without opioids. In fact, there have been hundreds of deaths due to suicide of people who can no longer find doctors to treat their chronic intractable pain. Doctors are afraid to prescribe pain medication because our DEA has weaponized the academically corrupt and draconian CDC Guidelines for Prescribing Opioids that Kolodny and his group, PROP almost single-handedly wrote.
This is happening because the DEA cannot and never will win the war on drugs against the cartels, so it is instead going after easier-to-target doctors who prescribe and holding up their arrests as a “win.” Meanwhile, people like Kolodny come on your show and profit from this false narrative. Chronic pain patients who have been force tapered off their medications as a result of the CDC guidelines and DEA actions are turning to street drugs or suicide because they have no other choice and are making the overdose epidemic worse. They are being coerced into having expensive procedures in lieu of low-cost, proven effective opioid medication out of desperation. They are being dropped by their doctors who don’t want to risk DEA attention for treating them and they cannot find new ones to treat their pain for the same reason.
It is in his financial interest to perpetuate the lie that prescription opioids are the cause of the opioid crisis. He makes millions of dollars as a paid witness in multidistrict litigation against opioid manufacturers. In 2019, he was paid $725 an hour to testify against Johnson & Johnson in Oklahomas lawsuit against the opioid manufacturer, and admitted to making somewhere between $300,000 and $500,000 just on that trial. The case resulted in a $425 million verdict against the drug maker which was later overturned by Oklahoma’s Supreme Court.
Why Kolodny Can’t Be Trusted as an Objective Source
A host of despicable lies that Mr. Kolodny repeats ad nauseum about chronic and acute pain to advance his financial agenda can be found on TheDoctorPatinetForum.com, an organization that has been fighting for pain patients’ rights since 2016.
On your program, Kolodny was allowed to peddle his favorite drugs, buprenorphine and Suboxone, in which he very likely has a financial interest, by stating that it should be available to treat addiction everywhere. He is a known salesman for buprenorphine and Suboxone, and made a name for himself promoting the drug as a New York City health department psychiatrist in 2005 and has continued to name drop the drugs, as he did on your show, to promote its use. It’s difficult to believe that he is not on the payroll of Indivior, Suboxone’s manufacturer, as a speaker or consultant. He continues to preach buprenorphine and Suboxone as “first line treatment for opioid addiction.”
By the way, Indivior is a spin-off company that used to be part of Reckitt Benckiser a British form that got its drug approved as an addiction treatment in 2002, and which settled with the Department of Justice for $1.4 billion to resolve criminal and civil liability in its marketing of a film version of Suboxone to clinicians and Medicaid administrators as less divertable and abusable and safer around children, families, and communities than other buprenorphine drugs without studies to back those claims up. The indictment also alleged that Indivior discontinued the tablet form of Suboxone supposedly to delay the Food and Drug Administration’s approval of a generic tablet form of the drug so that it could charge more for the newly patented film version and fraudulently convert thousands of patients from the tablet to the film causing state Medicaid programs to cover the film at substantial cost to government.
Kolodny helped found PROP not only to make himself and his narcophobic colleagues look like legitimate expert witnesses to be hired out by law firms prosecuting multidistrict legislation, but also to criminalized pain and criminalize and stigmatize pain patients as addicts so that he can peddle his favorite drugs to them, because if you can successfully characterize all pain as drug-seeking and addiction, you can then sell desperate people an opioid that was meant for treating addiction.
I hope you will consider telling the story of abandoned pain patients on your program, and help correct the false narrative that doctors are to blame for America’s opioid crisis. Untreated pain patients are the victims of politically and financially motivated opioid fear mongering that has gone on in this country for the past two decades.
I appreciate your consideration. Please feel free to reach out to me at ChronicPainPariah@gmail.com
Sincerely,
Darlene Loewin
ChronicPainPariah.com 