Field map · United States · Reviewed September 14, 2026
The chronic pain advocacy landscape Institutions, people, and lines of relationship.
This is a documented map of a fractured but interconnected field. It names public institutions and the people publicly identified with them, distinguishes cooperation from mere agreement, and places Seeds of Vice inside the landscape rather than above it.
Use this page
What is this?
The Chronic Pain Advocacy Landscape is a source-based map of public organizations, people, functions, and documented relationships in the field.
What can I do with it?
Use it to compare public roles and positions without treating shared appearances, agreement, or criticism as proof of private coordination.
What should I do next?
Read the method and relationship labels first, then move into the institutional map.
Read the Method →What this page can establish
An honest map begins by refusing invented alliances.
The chronic pain field is not one organization and it has no uncontested national leader. It contains patient organizations, litigation and policy groups, professional societies, researchers, physician defenders, media outlets, botanical policy organizations, and critics of opioid prescribing. The same person may move through several of these spaces.
This review uses official leadership pages, policy statements, organizational reports, event programs, podcasts, and attributable public posts. It gives more weight to an institution’s own current material than to commentary about it. Public criticism is included when it reveals a substantive policy or strategy dispute. Anonymous accusations and unsupported claims of grifting, infiltration, or controlled opposition are not assigned to named people.
Four relationship labels
Not every line means the same thing.
Formal relationship
A named coalition, joint filing, shared committee, organizational partnership, or explicit collaboration.
Public interaction
An interview, event, shared public comment, credited research, or other attributable contact.
Independent agreement
Public positions materially overlap, but no coordinated work has been established.
Substantive difference
The organizations pursue different methods, boundaries, theories of change, or final policy goals.
The principal public nodes
One cause, several centers of gravity.
The categories describe primary public function. They are not claims that an institution does only one kind of work.
| Institution | Publicly identified people | Primary function | Recurring public position | Relationship to the wider field |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Seeds of Vice | Kenneth Vice | Public record archive, authority mapping, civic method, and independent publishing | Personal authority, individualized care, documentary discipline, lawful public inquiry, and the Right of the Harmless | Independent node with issue overlap across legal, grassroots, physician autonomy, and botanical constituencies |
| National Pain Advocacy Center | Kate Nicholson; Juan Hincapie-Castillo | Law, regulation, federal and state policy | Individualized care, opposition to forced tapering and arbitrary limits, disability rights and harm reduction | Formal bridge among advocates, researchers, and professional societies |
| The Doctor Patient Forum | Claudia Merandi; Beverly Schechtman | Grassroots mobilization, patient stories, legislation, podcast and social media | Medication access, scrutiny of PDMP systems and NarxCare, defense of patients and prescribers | High visibility connector between patients and policy commentators |
| National Campaign to Protect People in Pain | Richard A. Lawhern; Jonelle Elgaway | Decentralized advocacy, medical board outreach, moderator network | Evidence based individualized care and removal of political interference | Coalition style network that credits and circulates work from other groups |
| U.S. Pain Foundation | Nicole Hemmenway; Cindy Steinberg; Ellen Lenox Smith; Stu Smith | Large patient nonprofit, education, state and federal advocacy, support programs | Multidisciplinary care, balanced opioid policy, research, telehealth, and medical cannabis | Mainstream patient organization with broad program scope |
| U.S. Association for the Study of Pain | Burel Goodin; Beth Darnall; Diane Hoffmann; Kate Nicholson | Scientific society, research translation, professional policy advocacy | Patient centered, scientifically rigorous pain care | Institutional meeting point for scientists, clinicians, advocates, and people with lived experience |
| American Academy of Pain Medicine | Antje Barreveld and elected professional leadership | Physician professional society and formal advocacy | Evidence based multimodal care and clinician policy engagement | Professional legitimacy and agency facing policy work |
| Doctors of Courage | Linda Cheek | Physician defense, direct advocacy, anti-prohibition education | Repeal of the Controlled Substances Act and an end to drug war enforcement against doctors and patients | Maximalist edge of the physician autonomy camp |
| Pain News Network | Pat Anson | Independent news and commentary | Coverage of opioids, cannabis, kratom, research, policy, and patient experience | Media intermediary where rival views and internal conflict become visible |
| American Council on Science and Health | Josh Bloom; Lynn Webster | Scientific and policy commentary | Criticism of opioid restrictions and claims viewed as scientifically weak | Technical media ally frequently connected to patient advocates |
| Cato Institute | Jeffrey A. Singer | Libertarian policy analysis | Critique of drug prohibition and prescribing policy as drivers of harm | Cross movement convening and intellectual support |
| American Kratom Association | Mac Haddow | Botanical consumer policy and state regulation | Regulated access to natural kratom and opposition to scheduling | Adjacent botanical constituency with substantial pain community overlap |
| Physicians for Responsible Opioid Prescribing | Andrew Kolodny; Jane Ballantyne as prior president | Opioid risk policy and prescribing reform | Reduced opioid exposure and stronger prescribing controls | Countervailing pressure and frequent object of criticism within patient advocacy |
The field is fragmented, but it is not sealed into hostile camps. People, information, and public arguments cross the boundaries constantly.
Named institutions and people
Who they are, and what they actually do.
National Pain Advocacy Center
Public leadership: Founder and Executive Director Kate Nicholson; Board President Juan Hincapie-Castillo.
NPAC is the clearest institutional policy node in this landscape. Its public work includes agency comments, legislative analysis, legal and civil rights framing, opposition to forced tapering, scrutiny of DEA quota reductions and algorithmic surveillance, and collaboration with scientific and professional organizations. Its published board and scientific council connect people with lived pain to law, medicine, pharmacy, public health, disability rights, and addiction policy.
NPAC is not merely a quiet archive. It also organizes public advocacy. Nor is it a simple prescription preservation group. Its public material explicitly joins pain policy to harm reduction and the rights of people who use drugs. Official advocacy Leadership
The Doctor Patient Forum
Public leadership: Founder and President Claudia Merandi; Co-founder and Vice President Beverly Schechtman.
DPF is a public facing patient and clinician defense organization built around rapid communication, personal stories, state legislation, PDMP and NarxCare scrutiny, and a large social media audience. Its tone is often more direct than that of professional societies. Its podcast and campaigns also make it a bridge, not an isolated street level faction.
The evidence cuts against a simple claim that DPF and legal policy advocates are natural enemies. DPF has publicly thanked Kate Nicholson for her work, interviewed attorney and NPAC adviser Jennifer Oliva, and hosted Jeffrey Singer, Josh Bloom, Carl Hart, and other policy figures. Its recent public programming has also defended kratom users against broad crisis framing, which contradicts the idea that it permits only pharmaceutical discussion. Leadership Public podcast Public post
National Campaign to Protect People in Pain
Public contacts: Richard A. “Red” Lawhern and Jonelle Elgaway.
NCP3 presents itself as a broad campaign for evidence based pain care rather than a single centralized membership institution. It supports state medical board and pharmacy board outreach, public education, and materials that local advocates can use. Its meeting and progress reports credit other advocates and organizations, including DPF, and describe collaboration with group moderators while preserving separate voices.
Lawhern’s public record also shows the connective tissue of the movement. He has said publicly that he works with Claudia Merandi, has promoted DPF public comments, and has appeared with Kate Nicholson in a Cato Institute forum. Campaign site Reports and resources Cato event
U.S. Pain Foundation
Public leadership: Chief Executive Officer Nicole Hemmenway; Policy and Advocacy Director Cindy Steinberg; Medical Cannabis program co-directors Ellen Lenox Smith and Stu Smith.
U.S. Pain Foundation is a large, programmatic patient organization. Its priorities include access to multidisciplinary care, balanced opioid policy, telehealth, research, and medical cannabis. That record matters because it disproves the broad assertion that mainstream pain organizations uniformly reject plant derived medicine. The actual boundary is narrower. Medical cannabis can be incorporated through regulated, evidence oriented programs while unregulated cultivation and self-preparation remain outside most formal coalition work.
The foundation also publicly discloses that it receives corporate support and publishes financial information. Funding differences are relevant to institutional incentives, but funding alone does not prove that a particular position was purchased. Leadership 2026 priorities Funding
USASP and AAPM
Publicly identified people: USASP President Burel Goodin; President-elect Beth Darnall; Advocacy Chair Diane Hoffmann; Advocacy Co-chair Kate Nicholson. AAPM’s current public site identifies Antje Barreveld as president.
The U.S. Association for the Study of Pain and the American Academy of Pain Medicine are institutional bridges to research and clinical practice. USASP places scientists, clinicians, patient advocates, and people with lived experience in formal committees. The presence of Nicholson and Christin Veasley in USASP leadership structures shows that the research world and the advocacy world are not separate rooms.
AAPM works through professional statements, agency engagement, and organized medicine. These institutions generally use narrower scientific language and favor multimodal care. That can create friction with advocates who hear “opioid stewardship” as a path back to coercive reduction, even when the same institution also opposes rigid limits. USASP leadership AAPM advocacy
Doctors of Courage
Public leader: Linda Cheek, physician and founder.
Doctors of Courage occupies a more radical policy position than most national pain organizations. It links the prosecution of prescribers and abandonment of patients to the Controlled Substances Act and calls for repeal rather than incremental prescribing reform. The site itself makes a substantive internal disagreement visible by contrasting Lawhern’s focus on revoking CDC prescribing guidance with Cheek’s demand to repeal the Controlled Substances Act.
This is a real division in end goals. It is not proof of personal hostility. One strategy tries to change the operational rules now governing care. The other argues that the legal architecture producing those rules must be dismantled. Official site
Pain News Network, ACSH, and Cato
Public figures: Pain News Network founder and editor Pat Anson; ACSH Director of Chemical and Pharmaceutical Science Josh Bloom and contributor Lynn Webster; Cato Senior Fellow Jeffrey A. Singer.
These are not interchangeable institutions. Pain News Network reports and publishes commentary across pain, opioid, cannabis, kratom, and research debates. ACSH uses sharper scientific and polemical commentary against restrictive opioid policy. Cato supplies a libertarian critique of prohibition and convenes cross movement discussions.
They function as transmission points. DPF has interviewed Bloom and Singer. Cato placed Nicholson, Lawhern, and physician Andrea Trescot on one public panel. Pain News Network documented both the proliferation of small advocacy groups and leaders’ concerns about bickering, purity tests, and harassment. Because many interviewees were anonymous, that reporting supports a structural conclusion about fragmentation. It does not justify attaching those allegations to a named person. PNN staff Fragmentation report Unity report Josh Bloom Jeffrey Singer
American Kratom Association
Public policy leader: Mac Haddow, Senior Fellow on Public Policy.
AKA is not primarily a chronic pain organization. It is a botanical consumer and regulatory organization with a constituency that overlaps the pain community. It promotes regulated access to natural kratom and opposes state scheduling. Its model is legislative and regulatory, often through versions of a Kratom Consumer Protection Act.
The organization is therefore adjacent to Seeds of Vice on questions of plant knowledge, consumer autonomy, public authority, and scheduling. The overlap does not establish collaboration, and kratom policy should not be treated as a substitute for the distinct legal and historical questions surrounding poppy plants. Official site Public policy statement
Physicians for Responsible Opioid Prescribing
Public leadership: Andrew Kolodny became president after Jane Ballantyne, effective in 2022.
PROP sits outside patient autonomy advocacy but inside the policy environment that advocacy must answer. It has promoted stronger opioid prescribing controls and became a central symbol of what pain advocates oppose. DPF’s public language directly challenges PROP, while patient advocates and policy scholars dispute the evidence, consequences, and institutional influence of restriction centered approaches.
A serious movement map includes the opposing policy node without turning disagreement into speculation about private motives. The documented conflict concerns policy, evidence, influence, and consequences. Official leadership notice
Where the lines actually run
Connection without conformity.
NPAC ↔ USASP and allied institutions
Kate Nicholson co-chairs USASP advocacy, and NPAC publicly describes coalition work with scientific, disability, patient, and professional groups. This is a formal institutional relationship.
DPF ↔ policy commentators
DPF interviews and campaigns connect Merandi and Schechtman’s grassroots audience with Oliva, Singer, Bloom, and other legal, medical, and policy voices.
Lawhern ↔ Nicholson ↔ Merandi
Lawhern has appeared publicly with Nicholson and stated that he works with Merandi. DPF has publicly praised Nicholson. The record shows interaction across the supposed street and legal divide.
Pain advocacy ↔ botanical policy
Medical cannabis programming and kratom coverage cross into mainstream pain spaces. The hard boundary appears closer to unregulated self-cultivation and preparation than to every form of plant medicine.
Incremental reform ↔ repeal
Most organizations seek changes to guidelines, boards, payer rules, surveillance systems, and enforcement practice. Doctors of Courage publicly argues for repeal of the Controlled Substances Act itself.
Patient autonomy ↔ restriction centered policy
PROP and allied restriction arguments remain the clearest external counterforce. The dispute centers on risk, evidence, regulatory power, and the consequences of prescribing reduction.
The real fault lines
What divides the movement after the slogans end.
Immediate relief or durable precedent
Public campaigns seek attention and rapid pressure. Legal and regulatory work seeks language that survives agency review, litigation, and leadership changes. The strongest efforts use both, but the tempo and evidentiary discipline are different.
Prescription access or broader bodily autonomy
Some advocates focus on restoring clinician authority within the existing medical system. Others extend the claim to drug prohibition, botanical self-management, or repeal of federal control. Agreement on forced tapering does not settle the larger question.
Multimodal care as expansion or substitution
Formal institutions often support behavioral, rehabilitative, interventional, pharmaceutical, and complementary care together. Patients become suspicious when “multimodal” is used to remove a medication that was helping rather than add meaningful options.
Institutional legitimacy or institutional capture
Coalitions need access to agencies, professional societies, donors, and researchers. Grassroots advocates fear that access can soften the demand or exclude people with stigmatized practices. The record supports examining funding and governance. It does not support treating every relationship as corruption.
Central coordination or independent cells
A national coalition can concentrate expertise and speak in formal proceedings. Decentralized groups can adapt to state boards and protect local autonomy. Fragmentation becomes harmful when it duplicates work, obscures responsibility, or turns strategic disagreement into personal warfare.
Witness, expert, and representative authority
Lived experience establishes what happened to a person. Technical expertise helps explain systems. Organizational leadership can coordinate work. None of those roles automatically grants the right to speak for every patient, clinician, or advocate.
Seeds of Vice in the field
Related to many. Owned by none.
Publicly identified founder and publisher: Kenneth Vice, Oklahoma Lobbyist #651113.
Strongest methodological kinship: NPAC’s source driven legal and regulatory work, USASP’s effort to place research beside lived experience, and NCP3’s distributed state and board level advocacy.
Strongest issue alignment: DPF, NCP3, ACSH, Cato, and physician defenders on forced tapering, prescriber fear, algorithmic surveillance, regulatory overreach, and the human consequences of blunt opioid policy.
Strongest botanical adjacency: AKA and medical cannabis advocates on plant knowledge, scheduling, consumer autonomy, and the difference between a botanical substance and a simplified crisis narrative.
Important divergence: Seeds of Vice places unusual emphasis on primary source archives, identification of the exact controlling authority, individual self-representation, poppy history, and the Right of the Harmless. It does not treat access to a prescription as the complete measure of personal authority.
Verified collaboration status: this review found no public source establishing a formal partnership between Seeds of Vice or Kenneth Vice and the institutions or people mapped above. Any current relationship should therefore be described as public alignment, adjacency, or potential compatibility unless a joint project, shared filing, formal role, or explicit statement establishes more.
Editorial conclusion
The movement’s weakness is not disagreement. It is unmarked disagreement.
A healthy field can contain incremental lawyers, direct action organizers, research societies, abolitionists, botanical advocates, and independent archivists. The danger begins when a public interaction is inflated into an alliance, a strategic difference is recast as betrayal, or an allegation is repeated until it becomes a biography.
The useful task is to mark the relationship honestly. Say who filed together, who appeared together, who merely agrees, who disagrees, and what the evidence can actually carry. That standard will not end conflict. It can keep conflict from becoming fiction.
Selected public record
Read the institutions in their own words.
Leadership changes. Positions evolve. These sources were reviewed for this map on September 14, 2026.
- National Pain Advocacy Center, Advocacy.
- National Pain Advocacy Center, leadership and advisers.
- The Doctor Patient Forum, Our Team.
- The Doctor Patient Forum, public podcast archive.
- National Campaign to Protect People in Pain.
- NCP3 reports and campaign resources.
- U.S. Pain Foundation, leadership.
- U.S. Pain Foundation, 2026 key issues and priorities.
- U.S. Pain Foundation, funding disclosures.
- U.S. Association for the Study of Pain, leadership and committees.
- American Academy of Pain Medicine, advocacy efforts.
- Doctors of Courage.
- Pain News Network, staff and mission.
- Pain News Network, “New Advocacy Group Seeks Smarter Solutions to Pain Crisis”.
- Pain News Network, “Can the Chronic Pain Community Unite Before It’s Too Late?”.
- American Council on Science and Health, Josh Bloom profile.
- Cato Institute, Jeffrey A. Singer profile.
- Cato Institute, public forum with Nicholson, Lawhern, and Trescot.
- American Kratom Association.
- American Kratom Association, Ohio scheduling statement.
- Physicians for Responsible Opioid Prescribing, leadership notice and media archive.
- Seeds of Vice, institutional identity and method.
- Seeds of Vice, Institutional Standards.