CLARK TRIAL CONTINUES

ABINGDON -- A former minister and recovering drug addict told a federal
jury Tuesday he worked as a volunteer for Dr. Freeman Lowell Clark at the
same time he was receiving narcotics prescriptions from him. Harold
Underwood, 66, of Wytheville said he worked for several months at Clark's
clinic, sometimes taking patients' vital statistics and medical histories
despite a lack of medical training. "I was just trying to help out," said
Underwood, who also was an alcoholic. "I didn't have anything else to do."
Underwood said he "tried" to take readings of patients' blood pressure when
asked by the doctor to do so and sometimes would talk to patients about
their personal lives while taking down their histories. All the while,
Underwood said, he was abusing narcotic OxyContin, Darvocet, Percodan,
Tylox and Lorcet pills Clark was prescribing for his back and neck pain.
"When I get on something, I have to be locked up to get off it," he said.
It was the fifth day of trial for Clark, 43, who is charged with 298 counts
of prescribing narcotic painkillers without a legitimate medical purpose.

If convicted on all counts, he faces hundreds of years in prison and
millions of dollars in fines. 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. Clark's alleged offenses occurred in 1999 and
2000 at his clinic, which first was in Bluefield and later moved to
Wytheville, then Bland. Underwood, who said he now is free of narcotics and
taking nonaddictive Celebrex for his pain, said he volunteered while the
clinic was in Bluefield and Wytheville. At one point, he said, he was
taking as many as 12 narcotic pain pills a day but claimed the doctor knew
nothing of his addiction. "He had no way of knowing that," Underwood said.
"I never got to the point where I was completely out of it." But the former
minister said he met the doctor in a 12-step program for recovering
alcoholics, so Clark at least was aware of Underwood's alcoholism, he said.
Underwood defended the doctor, saying Clark conducted thorough examinations
before prescribing narcotic painkillers. "He always examined me," Underwood
said. "It was never just ask for medicine and get it." Another patient,
Edward Stamper, 44, of Bluefield said the OxyContin pills Clark prescribed
allowed him to keep working after hurting his back in a mining accident.
"I'm feeling a whole lot better than I ever have ... in the last four to
five years," he said. But Stamper also said he sometimes had to wait up to
12 hours to see the doctor. "He would keep putting you off, telling you,
`It'll be a minute,'" Stamper said. He added that he rarely talked to other
patients waiting with him for hours at the clinic. "They were just not my
type of people -- shady-looking characters," he said. Connie Hatfield, 46,
of Princeton, W.Va., said she began seeing Clark because no other doctor in
the area would take her as a patient. "I had called several different
doctor's offices," Hatfield testified. "As soon as I told them I had
chronic pain they would say they weren't taking anymore patients." Clark
was willing to prescribe OxyContin, which Hatfield said she continues to
take for back pain. "I can't function without my pain medication," she
said, adding that she didn't abuse the drugs. Prosecutors are expected to
rest their case when the trial resumes at 9 a.m. today.