Pubdate: Wed, 04 Jul 2001 Source: Bristol Herald Courier (VA) Copyright: 2001 Bristol Herald Courier Contact: http://www.bristolnews.com/contact.html Website: http://www.bristolnews.com/ Details: http://www.mapinc.org/media/1211 Author: Marshall Tobelmann TRIAL STARTS FOR BLAND COUNTY PHYSICIAN ABINGDON -- Trial began Tuesday in federal court for a Bland County doctor accused of running a pill shop for nearly a year from clinics in Bluefield, Bland and Wytheville. Outlining their case in opening statements, prosecutors said Dr. Freeman Lowell Clark, 43, had a following of drug-addicted patients who would drive long distances to his clinics and wait at as late as 2 a.m. to get narcotics prescriptions. Clark is charged with 298 counts of illegally prescribing potent painkillers, including OxyContin, Percocet, Lortab and Lorcet, without a legitimate medical purpose. If convicted on all counts, the doctor could face hundreds of years in prison and millions of dollars in fines. "They both knew the game," said Assistant U.S. Attorney Randy Ramseyer of Clark and his patients. "The game is, if you're a patient and you want drugs from a doctor, you can't just go in and say you want drugs." Ramseyer said patients would offer bogus reasons for needing pain pills and that Clark would record those symptoms his charts before issuing illegal prescriptions. The doctor knew patients were abusing the drugs but continued to prescribe them anyway, the prosecutor said. Defense attorney Bob Rider portrayed Clark as a caring physician "whose life is dedicated to healing, dedicated to pain management." Although Rider conceded that some drug abusers deceived the doctor into overprescribing pills, he said there wasn't enough evidence to convict him of intentional wrongdoing. "Oh, sure, there were some of them who pulled the wool over the doctor's eyes," he said. "But that's not what he is charged with." Patients followed Clark when he moved from his Bluefield location to an office in downtown Wytheville and then to Bland -- all between April 1999 and March 2000, the prosecutor said. The clinics would stay open past midnight, and some patients would wait for eight or more hours to get their prescriptions, Ramseyer said. "Just ask yourself -- why did all these people go to Dr. Clark?" he told the jury. But Rider said the doctor had no motivation for getting his patients hooked. "This doctor didn't even bill a third of his patients," the defense lawyer said. "He lost money." Ramseyer said some prosecution witnesses would be hesitant to speak ill of the doctor who fed their addictions. "A lot of the witnesses you hear are going to be Dr. Clark's friends, his patients," the prosecutor told the jury. "It's going to be obvious that they're pretty hostile to the government's case." More than a third of the charges against Clark involve OxyContin, a synthetic morphine used to treat severe or chronic pain. Addiction to OxyContin is a growing problem in the region, authorities say, with abusers crushing the pills and then snorting or injecting them to get a powerful high. Four Southwest Virginia physicians already have been convicted of illegally prescribing OxyContin and other narcotic painkillers. The drug has been linked to more than 120 deaths nationwide, and more than three dozen Southwest Virginians have died of OxyContin overdoses. West Virginia officials and seven Southwest Virginia residents last month filed class-action lawsuits against the makers of OxyContin -- Purdue Pharma Inc. and four affiliates -- for allegedly using coercive marketing tactics to get doctors to overprescribe the drug. Clark's trial is set to continue Thursday at 9 a.m. with testimony from prosecution witnesses. - --- MAP posted-by: Beth