On May 3, the Maryland-based prescription drug distributor McKesson Corp. announced that it had agreed to pay $13 million in civil fines in order to settle allegations that it had sold 3 million units of hydrocodone to NewCare Pharmacy in East Baltimore and large quantities of phentermine-based products to Smeeta Pharmacy in Highland.

The owners of NewCare Pharmacy have been indicted on federal charges of illegally selling more than 9.9 million dosage units of hydrocodone as part of a nationwide Internet operation in 2005 and 2006.

“Carl J. Kotowski, assistant special agent in charge of the Drug Enforcement Administration’s Baltimore office, said the operation at Newcare sparked the largest federal pharmaceutical drug investigation in the state’s history.

“‘It’s not like [they had] to go out onto the street,” Kotowski said of Newcare’s customers. ‘Everything is very discreet. You just go online. It’s no different than buying a book on Amazon.’”

I’ve often wondered about all of these illegal online pharmacies… where do they get their products and how do people know it’s safe to order from them? I guess this provides one answer to my query. The thing that is most crazy is that this online pharmacy managed to rack up some $20 million in sales of Vicodin to people without prescriptions. Obviously there is a huge demand for these narcotic painkillers. So, as Stephen Soderberg’s blockbuster hit “Traffic” so eloquently pointed out, maybe instead of going after the suppliers of these drugs, our government needs to start taking a better look at why everyone wants them so badly in the first place. It seems to me that we’re going about this all wrong. Instead of cutting off the supply, perhaps we should try to figure out how to cut off the demand.

Time magazine recently reported that a landmark study on pain found that, of the millions of Americans suffering from chronic pain, the vast majority come from lower-income households.

“Americans in households making less than $30,000 a year spend nearly 20 percent of their lives in moderate to severe pain, compared with less than 8 percent of people in households earning above $100,000 … The findings, published Thursday in the British journal the Lancet, also found that participants who hadn’t finished high school reported feeling twice the amount of pain as college graduates.”

Well I’ll be. Let me get a chair so I can sit down and recover from the shock.

I mean seriously, some of these studies have to make you laugh. DUUUHHHHH! I have no doubt that a quarter of a million Americans are suffering from daily pain - why do you think our market is flooded with every painkiller imaginable? Why are there so many people addicted to narcotics like Vicodin and Percocet? I mean, is it really a big surprise that the people suffering the most are the people who aren’t making that much money? These are the people with jobs that require physical labor, and these are also the people who have untold stress in their lives when it comes to paying their bills.

Well, I guess this is good news for the makers of Advil, Tylenol, Bayer, Alleve, Vicodin, Percocet, Tramadol, Codeine, and all the rest. My question is, how long can we keep popping pills to make our pain go away? Aren’t we only masking the symptoms of a larger problem?