When dealing with the government’s war on prescription painkillers, the mainstream media coverage has been overwhelmingly one-sided. Any place that dispenses painkillers is a “pill mill,” anyone who takes these things is a lowlife drug addict, and the government’s brutal and heavy-handed tactics are fully justified to stop this spread of “poison.” Doctors that have been thrown into prison to a person have been portrayed in the media as evil drug dealers.

However, a recent article in Reuters casts doubt on this typical theme, as it deals with people who cannot get painkillers because the DEA has been raiding neighborhood and chain drugstores with regularity, pretty much treating everyone as the enemy. This is only one article, and it hardly makes up for the one-sided coverage in which the police, federal agents, and prosecutors always are treated as heroes instead of the brutal and dishonest people that they are. But at least it is a start.