Prior to a real pandemic that they were hopelessly unequipped to deal with, the CDC, Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, had begun to manufacture epidemics. Once their mandate was increased to include that "and prevention" part, they began looking for issues to turn into crises. And funding.

That is why during the Obama administration we got strange claims that had the rest of the world shaking their heads, like that there is a "pre-diabetes" epidemic. 500,000,000 Chinese people had to be wondering why the American government thought they would need medication based on an a1c blood level that had no clinical relevance - only 5% of those with it would ever get type 2 diabetes, in their entire lives.

And we got a vaping epidemic, despite it also never existing. Rather than being an epidemic, with "Reefer Madness" equivalent commercials of school children throwing their video game controllers through TVs if they didn't get their fix, vaping and other forms of tobacco cessation and harm reduction will save more lives than the Obama White House's weird vegetarian diets foisted off on poor school kids can even dream about.

Worst of all was their war on cancer patients. When government saw that media were touting claims of fentanyl addiction, they went after everyone they could find. Gone were the days when fentanyl users were crackheads and recreational junkies, once it was affluent white people in news accounts the blame shifted to Big Pharma and...doctors. They were wrong on all counts. While one company was without question unethical, the painkillers that got so much media attention were generic drugs, not Big Pharma products, and in their desire to blame everything for recreational drug use they began to target all doctors who issued what they arbitrarily said was a high number of prescriptions.

Pity the cancer patients. Imagine you are already trying to deal with cancer and every time you need a pain medication refill the government tells you that you need to schedule a doctor visit and have them sign off on why - or they will spend 20 years in jail. After the Affordable Health Care Act, and huge increases in costs for everyone, there is even less availability. In California, despite having top-tier health insurance, arguably the best insurance outside the kind politicians in Sacramento give themselves, I have a son who suffered a sudden seizure in April but was not able to get him to a neurologist before tomorrow. Nearly two months later.

In that health care morass, it was not just boneheaded to force cancer patients to visit a doctor to be retold they have cancer, it was immoral. That goes for a lot of other legitimate pain patients Then the pandemic made availability even worse but no one can blame COVID-19. The politicians who frequently claim health care should between health care and their doctor and controlled the White House at the time made it open season on doctors well before that.

There may be hope. The Supreme Court, in a 9-0 decision, just sided with with pain patients in a case involving two doctors who were registered under the Controlled Substances Act but whom government found were prescribing too much. These two were - one so much it moved the company's stock price - but the U.S. Department of Justice did not establish that the prescriptions were knowingly going to be used for illegitimate purposes. It sounds arcane, and despite the 9-0 ruling the Supreme Court Justices know it is going to create short-term confusion, but it is important because casual jail sentences without evidence that doctors were not acting in 'good faith' will stop.

Government had made 'pill mills' a problem by putting the handcuffs on doctors and patients. Now that the Department of Justice knows they can't just casually target doctors, they need evidence, the Biden administration may tell CDC to fix its real problems and stop creating new ones to march to Congress for funding about. 

Which means pain patients might be able to catch a break, and will stop being treated like they are casual recreational addicts or puppets of corporate evildoers.