In his 1969 novel The Wild Boys, William S. Burroughs writes “Under pretext of drug control suppressive police states have been set up throughout the Western world…. The police states maintain a democratic façade from behind which they denounce as criminals, perverts and drug addicts anyone who opposes the control machine.”

15 years earlier Dr. Ruth Fox formed the New York City Medical Society on Alcoholism. This organization subsequently became the American Medical Society on Alcoholism and eventually the American Society of Addiction Medicine.    The goal has always been to convince the medical establishment that 12-step recovery is the one and only treatment for alcoholism and drug addiction.

Unable to convince the medical establishment of this they decided that a better tactic would be to impose it on them.

And through propaganda, misinformation, lobbying, misleading public relations, and myriad other machinations used to promote a static ideology and suppress anything that contradicts, detracts, or otherwise not fit their world view as a product of themselves, they have admittedly succeeded.

This  includes creating a  “medical specialty” that requires neither knowledge nor competence.  Like Grimm fairy tale number 98, Doktor Allwissend (Doctor know-All) in which a poor peasant becomes a famous medical expert by declaring himself so ( by dressing like an expert, brandishing an ABC book with a rooster on the front, and having a sign painted with the words ‘I am Doctor Know-All’ and nailing it above the door to his house), the ASAM has “faked it til they made it.”

To make this point I sat for the exam with absolutely no preparation in 2010, passed by a respectable margin, and was “board certified” in addiction medicine. ABAM “board certification” is not recognized by the American Board of Medical Specialties (ABMS).  It is a “self-designated” medical specialty which means exactly what it sounds like.  “I hereby declare myself..”

Except for a year of psychopharmacology research, some MRO work, and “moonlighting” at local mental health facilities I have no education or training in addiction yet I was able to join the ASAM fold—–an exercise somewhat like showing how easy it is to buy a gun at Walmart.  The analogy does not end there however as they can both be “licenses” to kill.

Like  an NRA wallet card I never intended to use it.  I let it lapse so there is no need for the ASAM to revoke it.    It was in effect an  “academic exercise” to make a point-and that point being that I am no “expert” in addiction medicine and neither is 4000 of me.

 

 

By proclaiming themselves the cream of the crop, bestowing phony “board certification,” and creating the myth of expertise at the expense of the real experts and lobotomizing evidence based thought and critical thinking they have created a monopoly of despotism in addiction medicine treatment.  The ASAM and FSPHP  have created a tyranny in regulatory medicine that is unsupervised and opaque.  Moreover, they have grand plans for the rest of the population. They have influenced the DSM-V, are trying to gain control of MRO education and regulation, and pose a great danger to all of us.  This front-group for the 12-step assessment and treatment centers and the drug and alcohol testing industry is indeed fulfilling Burrough’s prediction of a police state.

They have money and and a monopoly of force by number (they outnumber Addiction Psychiatrists by 4:1) and the risks of this unqualified authoritarian control and influence involve all of us as a society.  And it impacts freedom, life, and liberty.

Alarmist call to arms about the dangers of drugs and hidden addicts protected by others and posing danger to create untrue hype is propaganda and misinformation to further the ASAM drug-testing 12-step inpatient rehab agenda and gain control. Drug war sloganeering designed to get everyone aboard. Logical fallacy, deceptive facts, pseudoscience, and misinformation is obvious if anyone cares to look a little deeper. The conflicts-of-interest are immense. The ASAM and FSPHP are front-groups that use ends-justifies-the-means coercion and deception to get public recognition of the righteousness of the twelve steps of recovery.

Neither doctors nor US citizens should be subject to the whims of a religion based political group composed of unqualified, inexperienced, paternalistic and biased individuals who are truncheons of dogmatic ideology and refuse to accept evidence based treatment, transparency, and accountability as important. ASAM board certification is not recognized by the ABMS. These are self-proclaimed specialists–great pretenders.   Underneath is a Potemkin village.  The emperor is bereft of all clothes.

The problem is that regulatory agencies, politicians, medical boards, and others have bought into the lie. Most people take them at face value resulting in the perception that they are indeed experts in addiction medicine and they are well on the way to becoming the only experts in addiction medicine. Within the next couple of years this will become a reality. The ASAM will shortly gain ABMS specialty certification. They are well funded.

The addiction psychiatrist subspecialty has already being pushed into a corner. Some have even joined in in rather than fade away–kind of like what happened to the proctologists as the gastroenterologists moved further up. But that analogy doesn’t quite work  as gastroenterology swallowing proctology represents an advancement in science.  Medicine, like all of science is fluid. What they represent is frozen.  Additionally it’s a lucrative gig.

This situation is more like the anti-vacciners parading themselves as experts in immunology and gaining enough support to run out the real McCoy.

 Pseudoscience, groupthink, deception, and coercion. A framework not built on the scientific method, evidence based decision making, autonomy and benevolence; but based on unproven ideological dogma, righteous inflexible worldview, rigid rules, obedience, and control. Drug testing of all physicians will be done by ASAM, FSPHP physicians. They will demand prohibition, testing, and treatment and will be in complete control. Even with 100% specificity and sensitivity there are valid arguments against this. But if you throw in the corruption and other issues that are obvious if one looks, then medicine as we know it is going to be lobotomized by dabblers and clowns.

It will come in a whimper not a bang and by then it will be too late. The goal of the ASAM has been to be recognized as the “experts” in addiction medicine ever since The American Society of Addiction Medicine (ASAM) was started by Dr. Ruth Fox in the 1950’s to promote AA and the 12-steps to doctors as a treatment for alcoholism.

PHP’s function to monitor and control. . Mandating coercive 12-step ideology onto physicians is SOP. The marked rise in physician suicide over the past decade is directly correlated with the FSPHP taking over state impaired physician programs. And the “kill em all let God sort em out” logical fallacy of saving doctors and protecting patients is propaganda with no evidence base.

This system, that encourages referring doctors confidentially for evaluation, is a nearly foolproof means to silence any physician they feel the need to. An accusation of substance abuse is made relatively easy. Then recommend an evaluation to one of your own people who will confirm the problem and force them into a 5 -year monitoring program where you must abide by the twelve step road to salvation.

By colluding with a short list of inpatient drug treatment centers such as Hazelden, Talbott, Marworth, Farley, and others where co-conspirators there will engage in “confirmatory bias” and “confirmatory distortion” to make the assessment fit the diagnosis they have a nearly perfect system to remove any physician from practice. It is “political abuse of psychiatry.”

 

In the former Soviet Union during the Khrushchev-Brezhnev era, the KGB used its forensic psychiatric institutions to brand, arbitrarily and for political reasons, large numbers of political dissidents as suffering from “schizophrenia” and “paranoid psychosis” and then incarcerated them for long periods in “special psychiatric hospitals.” In 1976, the Soviet Union was severely censured on this account by psychiatrists from all over the world at a conference in Hawaii of the World Psychiatric Association. Only after Gorbachev’s rise to power were these errors rectified. We have now discovered that similar practices have also occurred in certain parts of China.”¹– Jia Yicheng (China’s top forensic psychiatrist), 1998

 

 

Well to quote Zoolander “Earth to Mathilda” it’s occurring right here in the U.S. of A. but they have substituted “substance use disorder” for “schizophrenia” to delegitimize, marginalize, and ignore.

The ASAM claims an 80% success rate. If you look at the data they are basing this on it is illusory–sloganeering and propaganda with no substance.

The biggest obstacle is that this system allows them to throw the normal rules of conduct under the imperative of a higher goal assumed to trump all other consideration. Those outside of the FSPHP, ASAM system either defend or ignore the reports of ethical and criminal violations, complacent in their trust of these “experts” claiming they are just helping sick doctors and protecting the public.

The ASAM and FSPHP are gaining power and expanding in scope. They have effectively muscled forth the “war on drugs’ agenda to further their goals by establishing a system that of coercion, control, secrecy, and misinformation. The first wave was substance abusers, they then added any psychiatric diagnoses, then the disruptive physician”, and the next target is the “aging physician”.  Goodbye Dr. Welby.

The testing of physicians will inevitably include EtG and PEth—tests that Alabama PHS Director and ex-felon Greg Skipper introduced, proselytized, and brought to the drug testing industry like a carnival huckster. Introduced as  Laboratory developed tests (LDTs) to bypass FDA approval and regulation this junk science was commercialized, marketed, and paraded as scholarship.  Introduced with an arbitrary cutoff point of 100 it ruined countless lives.  God knows how many suicides were caused by this prohibitionist profiteer.

A 2011 study revealed that hand sanitizer alone can result in EtG levels c lose to 2000 ng/ml.

Dr. Skipper and Robert Dupont, are now recommending PEth as a confirmation test for an elevated EtG.

The evidence base is empty. Anecdotal reports supporting these tests and mostly done with Skipper as a co-author are essentially all that exist.

The June 2013 journal “Alcoholism: Clinical and Experimental Research”contains an article coauthored by Skipper and DuPont , Greg Skipperand Robert Dupont looking at 18“subjects” who tested positive for EtG and concluded that “positive PEth testing following positive EtG/EtS results confirm recent drinking.”Although they were unaware of it, these “subjects” were physicians enrolled in the Physician Health Program.

This is a system that oppresses physicians and is about to enter the domain of individual freedom, destroy the Bill of Rights, force 12-step philosophy and erode freedom of religion, stifle freedom of speech, and take us back decades.. They have convinced medical societies, medical boards, regulatory agencies, parole boards and others to not only accept them as experts, but to write legislation in states to declare them “the” experts in addiction medicine. They did this with a torrent of strategic lobbying efforts on behalf of the 12-step addiction treatment industry towards the AMA (and indirectly through the FSPHP towards the AMA), ABMS, APA, FSMB, ABIM, JCAO, CSAT, consumer groups, presidential candidates, state medical societies, congress, corrections agencies, social service agencies, faith-based community centers, the media and many other targets.

By convincing others of their expertise they have strategically placed themselves in a position of power that includes the ability to remove any doctor from practice.

“With one arm around the shoulder of religion and the other around the shoulder of medicine, we might change the world.”-Twelve Steps and Twelve Traditions, AA World Services, Inc (1953).

And unless something is done soon, every physician in the US will be at risk of losing everything at the whim of of a 12-step front group that places ideology above evidence base and dogma above virtue.

Claiming success they now want to bring it to you. Take a look at Robert Dupont’s keynote speech before the Drug and Alcohol Testing Industry Association.  Prohibitionist profiteers euphoric about the future bumper crop of clear cups and urine. “Test em all” Dupont wants to include schools and children in the net.  Reminiscent of the Nuremberg rallies he received a a thundering standing ovation.    And for this to happen all you have to do is one thing-nothing.