On my way to school yesterday I came across an article in the Philadelphia Inquirer and it extremely annoyed me. A Montgomery county psychiatrist was selling opioid prescriptions for non-medical use to pocket quick cash. Yet this man when arrested received a sentence of just four years.
This is sickening to me, how can someone who contributes to such a large scale issue, and enabled so many addictions receive such little time. He essentially destroyed families, handed people deadly pills knowing that they were not being properly used.
I've written before about the opioid epidemic, a deadly disease that is in some way affecting every single individual within the U.S. Since I last wrote I have dove further into research and have furthered my knowledge in what the numbers are with this disease and what contributes to this disease.
A large part of the epidemic is that misuse often will stem from a prescription that is over prescribed. The knowledge surrounding misuse is lacking drastically, and the care from physicians in overprescribing is minimal.
The amount of people who receive an opioid prescription even when they do not necessarily need it is extremely high and Pennsylvania has a high rate of prescriptions written per person in a year. The opioid epidemic could be drastically lowered if physicians all only prescribed what was an absolute necessity and were not corrupt like the psychiatrist in this article.
Four years is not a fitting sentence. This man deserves life in prison for destroying probably thousands of lives all to make some extra money. What makes it worse is he was a licensed psychiatrist so he knew the dangers of doing what he did and yet still did it anyway.
Only sentencing this man four years is sending a terrible message, it is telling any healthcare worker who is able to prescribe medication that if you illegally distribute controlled substances, you will only need to pay a fine and serve four years (a sentence that is lenient in comparison to how severe the crime was) and this is absolutely not ok.
Below is a link to the mentioned article, just remember that this needs change, and we need to be that change.
