DR. FREEMAN LOWELL CLARK TESTIFIES

ABINGDON -- A Bland County physician on trial in federal court told a
jury Wednesday that he struggled with depression and prescription
drug abuse before moving to Bluefield to establish a private practice
there in 1998.

Dr. Freeman Lowell Clark is facing 298 counts of prescribing narcotic
painkillers without a legitimate medical purpose.

He said he still is being monitored by the Virginia Board of Medicine
and last tested positive on a random drug screen in late 1999.

But since then, Clark said, he's been drug-free on 88 random
screenings and even volunteered to take more screens than normally
required.

"I wanted to make sure there was no misconception about me to
anybody," he said. "I wanted to show that there wasn't much question
as to my mind and my activities and my ability to perform as a
physician."

The testimony came on the sixth day of trial for Clark, 43.

More than a third of the counts involve morphine-like OxyContin,
which has been linked to more than 120 overdose deaths nationwide.

Abuse of the drug has reached epidemic levels in the region, and more
than three dozen Southwest Virginians have died of overdoses,
authorities say.

If convicted, Clark faces hundreds of years in prison and millions of
dollars in fines.

Clark's alleged offenses occurred between 1999 and 2000 at his
clinic, which first was in Bluefield and later moved to Wytheville,
then Bland.

The doctor said he began taking Xanax for depression after his wife,
an attorney, left him unexpectedly.

At the time, he was an emergency room physician in Tennessee. He said
his co-workers nicknamed him "Motor" because he was a workaholic.

He turned himself in for psychiatric therapy, and the Tennessee Board
of Medicine began random drug screenings, which continued in Virginia
when he was granted a license here, he said.

After a residency in rural medicine at East Tennessee State
University in Johnson City, Clark said, he moved to Bluefield to
start his first private practice.

New to the area, the doctor said he was forced to take patients no
one else would -- those who were poor and those with multiple medical
problems or in chronic pain.

"I actually inherited a lot of patients that nobody wanted to see,"
he said. "I didn't care. This was the first time in my life that I
had a practice that I could call my own."

Clark said he examined patients carefully before prescribing
narcotics and that his policy was to refer them to specialists if the
drugs weren't helping their pain.

"There were some cases I had where people were doing markedly, 100
percent better," he said.

Clark said he didn't just rely on patients' complaints of pain but
also looked at objective tests like X-rays and magnetic resonance
imaging scans.

Before Clark took the witness stand, prosecutors rested their case
following testimony from former patient Ricky Perdue, 45, of
Boissevain.

Perdue, an alcoholic on probation for doctor-shopping to get
narcotics, said he began obtaining Lortab pills from Clark from after
10 years of abusing the drug.

Perdue said he had a worn-out prosthetic hip and a host of other
problems but that he also wanted drugs to feed his habit of 25-35
pills a day.

"You're in pain but your addiction takes you there, too," he said.

Perdue said Clark almost never denied his request for extra pills,
even when he came back mere days after receiving a prescription.

"It was a few times he wouldn't give me no pills, but it wasn't many," he said.

But Clark testified that Perdue's "excruciating" hip, back and leg
pain, along with terrible breathing problems, warranted powerful
medication.

"It helped his pain," the doctor said.

Clark's testimony is scheduled to continue when the trial resumes
today at 9 a.m.