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.