When a voter initiative to legalize the medical use of marijuana passed in Montana last year - as it has every state in which such a law has been on the ballot - the result underscored the obvious: Pain is bad, and everybody knows it.

Like hunger, thirst and the need to sleep, pain is a condition we all can empathize with. Except for that tiny handful of children born without the ability to feel pain, we learn its lessons early on. And we hate it.

That's why it is disturbing to read about the federal Drug Enforcement Administration's apparent offensive against physicians who specialize in treating chronic pain sufferers with powerful narcotics.

Not that we don't agree with the need to prevent doctors from acting as virtual drug pushers, prescribing wildly unreasonable amounts to patients who turn around and sell the medicine to others. Last month a nationally known pain specialist in Virginia was sentenced to 25 years in prison after being convicted of such recklessness.

But it seems to be a different situation in Billings, where the Billings Gazette reported this week that DEA officers descended on a pain specialist's clinic, seized records and medicines, and ordered him to stop prescribing certain narcotic painkillers.

Dr. Richard A. Nelson, who has denied any wrongdoing and who has a clean record with state regulators, was forced to call about 50 patients to his office to explain he no longer could prescribe the most effective medicine for them.

The Gazette interviewed Siobhan Reynolds, head of an organization that advocates for pain patients and their doctors. "The DEA has been going after doctors en masse," she said. According to Reynolds, every pain doctor probably has some small percentage of patients who sell their drugs. "It's an impossible situation for the physicians."

If you needed powerful pain medicine, surely you'd agree it would be wrong to have it taken away just because some other patient was breaking the law. We have no idea whether or not that's been happing in Billings, but the impact on Dr. Nelson's patients is the same: a return to chronic pain.

Reading about their suffering isn't just depressing. It hurts.