When Attorney General Jeff Sessions advised people in Pain to "take some aspirin" and "tough it out" during a speech in Tampa last week, the federal prosecutors in his audience laughed. Mitzie Katzen, who has suffered from complex regional pain syndrome since she was a teenager, had a different reaction.

"I was just floored," Katzen says. "I could not believe what I was reading, and I thought that has to be somebody who has never experienced really severe pain for any length of time." Jacob Sullum says Katzen's perspective on Sessions' remarks illuminates the depravity of a policy that sacrifices the interests of patients like her in the name of fighting the "opioid epidemic."

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