49-Count Indictment Alleges Vast Conspiracy ALEXANDRIA - A federal grand jury indicted a McLean doctor yesterday on charges that he led a nationwide conspiracy to illegally distribute OxyContin and other potent painkillers, contributing to the deaths of at least three patients. Dr. William E. Hurwitz, 57, was named in a 49-count indictment charging him with conspiring to traffic drugs, drug trafficking resulting in death and serious injury, engaging in a criminal enterprise and health-care fraud. "The allegations against Dr. Hurwitz tell a story of a major and deadly drug dealer," U.S. Attorney Paul J. McNulty said. "He is a physician who, under the guise of chronic-pain management, dispensed misery and death." [continues 558 words]
Prosecutors cross-examined Dr. Rita Nzeribe Udom in federal court Friday, trying to determine whether she knew that an office worker was forging prescriptions for powerful narcotic pain relievers. "I exercised responsibility," Dr. Udom said. "I have prescriptions with good medical judgment. Carolyn (Mack), on the other hand, was selling drugs." Dr. Udom has pleaded innocent to conspiracy and 457 counts of unlawful dispensation of narcotic drugs. Prosecutors showed on computer monitors copies of two different prescriptions - one alleged to be genuine, and the other said to have been forged by Ms. Mack, her former office manager. [continues 227 words]
According to testimony at his trial, Cecil Byron Knox did not run your usual doctor's office. Maybe it was the wooden throne, the whispers about the dead squirrel under the couch, or the story that those noises in the basement were courtesy of beings known only as Beetle and Spider. There's no argument that Roanoke pain specialist Cecil Byron Knox's practice, Southwest Virginia Physical Medicine and Rehabilitation, was not the typical doctor's office. The one thing federal prosecutors and defense attorneys in the case against Knox and three of his associates at the practice do seem to agree about is that Cecil Byron Knox was not a typical doctor. [continues 697 words]
'Making The Pain Go Away At All Costs' Two very different portraits of Dr. Cecil Byron Knox and the medical practice he ran emerged Wednesday during opening statements and testimony at the federal trial of the Roanoke pain specialist and three of his associates. Assistant U.S. Attorney Rusty Fitzgerald portrayed Knox's practices as a violation of the age-old Hippocratic wisdom, "first, do no harm." "Making the pain go away at all costs ... is not within the scope of legitimate medical practice," Fitzgerald said in his opening statement. [continues 678 words]
Charge: Illegally Distributing Drugs ROANOKE - Was the clinic run by Dr. Cecil Byron Knox a haven for patients no one else would treat or an illegal drug-distribution operation? Jurors are expected to spend much of the next few weeks hearing evidence to help them answer that question. The Roanoke pain specialist and three of his former colleagues at Southwest Virginia Physical Medicine and Rehabilitation will go on trial beginning today in federal court. Knox, 54, is accused of illegally distributing drugs, some of which resulted in death or serious injury to some of his patients. The defendants also face charges that include conspiracy, mail fraud, health-care fraud and obstruction of justice. [continues 290 words]
Hawkesbury man argued regulations prevent him from growing enough plants The Federal Court of Canada has reserved its decision on whether to allow a Hawkesbury hepatitis C patient to grow 50 marijuana plants he says he needs to control nausea, pain and muscle spasms. Marc Paquette, 47, argued that Health Canada's medicinal marijuana regulations prevent him from getting the drugs he needs. He said the 25 plants he is allowed to cultivate take two months to grow and provide only one month of pain relief. [continues 448 words]
MELBOURNE -- Drug agents Tuesday arrested a pain-clinic doctor and a number of his patients in a major prescription-drugbust that could be linked to eight overdose deaths. Authorities said the arrests are part of a statewide investigation into the abuse of such powerful narcotics as OxyContin. More patients and doctors could be arrested in the coming weeks, they said. Shortly after 9 a.m. agents raided the We Really Care pain clinic on Sarno Road. They apprehended Dr. Sarfraz "Sam" Mirza, 60, and his office manager, Jackie Leblanc, 42. [continues 1004 words]
DAs Use Drug-Case Tactics Against Doctors Suspected In Deaths Medical doctors who allegedly prescribe too many painkillers are increasingly finding themselves targets of the same criminal laws long used against common drug dealers. And in a growing number of "pill mill" cases around the country, prosecutors not only are hitting doctors with traditional narcotics-related charges such as distribution of drugs but also are accusing them of murder in the prescription drug-related deaths of their patients. As the bold new tactic unreels from coast to coast, Dallas authorities say they adapted elements of a precedent-setting Florida investigation last month when they raided Dr. Daniel Maynard's clinic, house and car for records about his practice near Fair Park. [continues 1975 words]
TALLAHASSEEˇˇEach mother lost a son. Each son overdosed on prescription drugs. Each had a story to tell as they came together Tuesday, but the women had the same plea to state legislators: Pass a law aimed at preventing deaths from drug abuse. Still angry and still grieving, they came from Delray Beach, Palm Beach Gardens and Davie to testify in support of a bill to stop the spread of drug abuse that hit home for each of them. The bill would create a statewide computerized system that would allow officials to monitor prescriptions of controlled substances in an effort to stop rampant doctor-shopping and track doctors who over-prescribe. [continues 894 words]
How The OxyContin Crackdown Hurts Patients In Pain William E. Hurwitz spent much of last year trying to find new doctors for his patients. It wasn't easy, since physicians often are reluctant to treat chronic pain. They worry that repeated prescriptions for large doses of narcotic painkillers will attract unwanted attention from the government. That anxiety was the main reason Hurwitz had ended up treating so many people for pain -- about 300 patients suffering from cancer, rheumatoid arthritis, degenerative disc disease, diabetic complications, and other painful conditions. Some of them had searched for months or years, growing increasingly desperate, before finding him. Many lived hundreds of miles from his Northern Virginia office. [continues 3832 words]
Sleep is slow to come for the doctor's mother and troubled when it arrives. Alone in her house, in the dark, she wonders how the boy she raised became a man she doesn't recognize. "I wake up at night, and it's the first thing I think about," Dot Woodward says, "and sometimes it takes me two hours to go back to sleep." Woodward last saw her son in August, and when she did visit, they were separated by glass and wood, like a theater ticket-taker and a moviegoer. That's how they talked, too, by microphone, like she was his customer. The guards at the jail wouldn't let her hug him. Not even a touch. [continues 1694 words]
Millions of Americans suffer daily from chronic, nonmalignant, intractable pain. Intractable pain has been defined as pain that is excruciating, constant, incurable and of such severity that it dominates virtually every conscious moment, produces mental and physical debilitation, and may produce a desire to commit suicide for the sole purpose of stopping the pain. Yet this horrendous pain largely goes untreated. Doctors find numerous excuses. Some blame our government's insane War on Drugs and fear of the Drug Enforcement Administration. Others claim their hands are tied by the state medical and pharmacy boards. [continues 774 words]
Twenty-five years ago, my then 27-year-old wife, Cathy, was terminally ill. Marijuana would have helped to improve her appetite, and heroin would have eased her pain, but, as one doctor told us, "You're living in the wrong country." The stated fear was that she would become "addicted." It galls me that this attitude still prevails a quarter of a century after her death, a fact well established in the new compilation Busted: Stone Cowboys, Narco-Lords, and Washington's War on Drugs. The book does a thorough job of delineating the particulars of the failure of the "war on drugs." [continues 603 words]
Kentucky and three bordering states are among nine that will share $2 million in federal money this year to enhance or start monitoring programs to fight abuse of prescription drugs. The programs will make it harder for abusers in Kentucky and the adjoining states -- Ohio, West Virginia and Virginia -- to avoid detection by filling prescriptions at out-of-state pharmacies, said U.S. Rep. Hal Rogers, who created the federal grant program, which bears his name. But critics, led by a Kentucky-based group of pain doctors, say the Harold Rogers Prescription Drug Monitoring Program represents a piecemeal system that will make it difficult to share data and for physicians in border areas to identify "doctor shoppers" -- addicts who visit multiple doctors to get prescriptions for narcotics. [continues 1006 words]
Andy Sachs is not the stereotypical opiate junkie. He gets his drugs from a pharmacy, not a street dealer. He began taking his medicine for severe pain, not for the high. And the drug he's hooked on is more widely used than heroin. Six million people a year take OxyContin. His way out of addiction may be unusual as well: He chose a controversial treatment designed to rid him of his drug dependence in two days. Sachs, 26, a Las Vegas mortgage banker, is among the newest breed of opiate junkies -- those created, fueled and (Sachs hopes) cured by modern medicine. [continues 1698 words]
Bond Reduction Denied For Woodward Guns, gun parts, thousands of rounds of ammunition and books on how to make machine guns and hide assets were among items seized from Dr. D. Michael Woodward's office last year, according to court testimony Wednesday. Woodward, 45, is among several doctors charged in connection with a federal investigation involving the unlawful distribution of OxyContin and other pain medications at the defunct Comprehensive Care & Pain Management Clinic in Myrtle Beach. He's facing up to life in prison if convicted on charges of unlawful distribution of controlled substances, conspiracy to distribute controlled substances outside the usual course of medical practice and money laundering. [continues 655 words]
A report that methadone abuse can be deadly should not rule out the use of this narcotic in drug-addiction treatment programs. OXYCONTIN has been the target of intense police and media interest in Western Virginia, even as abuse of another narcotic has been quietly reaping deaths on an equal scale. Methadone, a synthetic narcotic used to treat opiate addictions - including addiction to oxycodone, the active ingredient in OxyContin - claimed four lives in the western part of the state in 1997; 44 in 2001. Deaths attributed to oxycodone went from one to 40 over the same period. Communities should address both trends, with heightened law enforcement and more treatment. And the growing need for treatment argues for, rather than against, easier access to methadone clinics. [continues 358 words]
POWELL'S POINT - When the pain overwhelms her, Mary Pittman props pillows around herself and covers the bedroom window with a comforter to keep out the light. For weeks, she's been confined to bed in her home on the Outer Banks near Kitty Hawk because of crippling pain in her knees, back and abdomen. "Look at them," she says as she and her three daughters lie in bed watching the movie "Anastasia." "It's a bright, sunny day and where are they? In the house." [continues 744 words]
Charges have been dismissed against a man caught with 22 marijuana plants, and that's a big victory for medical marijuana proponents, his lawyer says. Not so, says the Denver District Attorney's Office, which this month asked that drug charges be dismissed against James Scruggs because the evidence was likely insufficient to win a conviction. Police responded to Scruggs' home in November on a domestic violence call. They didn't find sufficient evidence of domestic violence but did find the marijuana. [continues 191 words]
