As health care writers and patient advocates, the authors are engaged in multiple projects intended to encourage major policy changes by highly resistant U.S. and state public health agencies. Misdirected policies and disinformation from these agencies are literally killing patients every day by denying them safe and effective management of agonizing pain, destroying the field of pain medicine, and criminalizing its practitioners.
This is institutionalized madness. It needs to stop. Now, not next year!
One element of the authors’ shared advocacy on behalf of people in pain has been lobbying State Boards of Medicine and Pharmacy to revise practice standards on pain management. For example, on December 17, 2025, Monty Goddard and Pat Irving, RN of the National Campaign to Protect People in Pain were invited presenters at an all-day California Prescribers and Patients Forum hosted by the California Department of Consumer Affairs and six California healing arts licensing boards, including the California Medical Board and Board of Pharmacy. Other presenters included representatives from the state Attorney General’s Office, the Drug Enforcement Administration, and other interested shareholders.
A brief summary of this forum was reported near the end of a January 27, 2026, meeting of the California State Board of Pharmacy. A slightly edited version of a portion of Mr. Goddard’s December address to the forum is eye-opening reading:
My wife’s (and my) story
My wife suffers from intractable pain, first diagnosed in 1997. After multiple surgeries and other alternative therapies failed to provide relief nearly two and a half decades ago, she was referred in 2002 by her PCP to a pain management specialist. This amazing physician gave my wife her life back!
She was placed on opioid medications, carefully titrated up to sufficient dosages to provide her with the physical function to enable a reasonable quality of life. I somewhat ashamedly acknowledge that treatment he provided her also enabled my life and career to continue. The last eight years of my career and the active first 6 to 7 years of “our” retirement were only possible because of her caring pain management physician and the medications he prescribed.
I retired in 2010. My wife and I were really enjoying life, including touring the country in our RV despite her being afflicted with the genetic condition responsible for her intractable pain. However, our ability to enjoy our “Golden Years” ended with the DEA’s mis-targeted, so-called “War on the Opioid Epidemic” and publication of the CDC’s fatally flawed and fraudulent 2016 opioid prescribing guidelines.
Our “Golden Years” were stolen by elected and appointed do-gooders who swallowed the “Opiophobia” false narratives of non-pain doctors like Andrew Kolodny and his “PROP” crew.
Not long after the 2016 CDC guidelines were published, my wife’s once well-treated pain became progressively undertreated as her pain management physician was unjustly persecuted, first by the Medical Board of California (MBC) when they launched their infamous “Death Certificate Project,” and subsequently by the DEA. In March of 2022, six months before the end of a three-year probation imposed by the MBC, my wife lost her pain management specialist who had safely treated her for over two decades, when after six years in two very costly court proceedings, the DEA declined to renew his registration to prescribe controlled substances.
A few years prior to her physician’s persecution, our Blue Cross / Blue Shield Federal Employer Program insurer implemented mandatory, ever-more-restrictive system-wide “prior approval” criteria. As a result, in 2012, my wife began a decade-long forced taper of her opioid pain medications. She is presently receiving 10 percent of the dosage she had safely used for over fourteen years prior to the CDC’s 2016 guidelines. During those prior fourteen years, her pain was sufficiently controlled to permit her to live a relatively normal productive life.
In 2019, additional (just as equally scientifically unsound) BC/BS “prior approval” criteria resulted in my wife “losing” anti-anxiety medication she had been prescribed since her mid-twenties. She was soon hospitalized for a “heart attack,” later diagnosed as an extreme panic attack.
My innocent, loving wife now has almost no quality of life. Her days, and nights, are spent trying not to do anything that will increase her pain, painfully aware that she does not have the requisite medications to control it.
A devout Christian, I know she would never consider suicide, but I often hear her praying for the Lord to take her.
I no longer pray.
It is time for truth.
It is time for state and federal health care regulators to admit that they have been profoundly wrong on science, ethics, and public law governing the practice of pain medicine. State “guidelines” on prescription of opioid analgesics and anxiety control medicines need to be more than incrementally “improved” as California is now attempting to do. Such guidelines need to be publicly repudiated and withdrawn. In a more just world, and as millions of patients now languishing in agony and deserted by their doctors would agree, opioid guideline authors should be indicted and prosecuted for fraud and negligent homicide.
The evidence for such steps is crystal clear in tens of thousands of patient narratives from social media and mainstream news, reporting thousands of patient suicides.
Richard A. Lawhern is a nationally recognized health care educator and patient advocate who has spent nearly three decades researching pain management and addiction policy. His extensive body of work, including over 300 published papers and interviews, reflects a deep critique of U.S. health care agencies and their approaches to chronic pain treatment. Now retired from formal academic and hospital affiliations, Richard continues to engage with professional and public audiences through platforms such as LinkedIn, Facebook, and his contributions to KevinMD. His advocacy extends to online communities like Protect People in Pain, where he works to elevate the voices of patients navigating restrictive opioid policies. Among his many publications is a guideline on opioid use for chronic non-cancer pain, reflecting his commitment to evidence-based reform in pain medicine.
Monty Goddard is a patient advocate.
