OVERDOSES PROMPT BAN ON CLINICS

'Close Them All,' One Mother Urges

The night before she watched her daughter's pupils roll skyward and
strained to understand the young woman's mumbling, Dawn Shulin saw a TV
news report about a St. Bernard man who died from an overdose of narcotics
prescribed at a pain clinic.

The next morning, Shulin's 22-year-old daughter could not stand up. She
could not focus her eyes. And she could not answer how many of the pills
she got from a pain clinic on Veterans Memorial Boulevard -- 120 each of
Vicodin, Lortab and Soma -- she took before she went to bed.

"It was ironic," Shulin said, recalling the April 5 incident. "I've been
watching this story on television . . . Monday night, and my daughter was
rushed to the hospital Tuesday morning."

The young woman was admitted to Kenner Regional Medical Center's intensive
care ward. It would be two days before she regained consciousness, her
mother said.

But the end of that ordeal set off a pair of new ones for Shulin: scraping
together $40,000 to send her uninsured daughter to a 30-day drug
rehabilitation program, and begging public officials to close down the kind
of pain clinics that helped feed her daughter's addiction.

Jefferson Parish Council Chairman Tom Capella said it was Shulin's call,
along with another last week from a mother whose daughter died after an
overdose of narcotics prescribed at a pain clinic, that sparked a measure
the council passed unanimously Wednesday to halt for six months the
establishment of new pain clinics.

The resolution also assigned the parish's Health Services Task Force to
study potential abuses by pain clinics and to recommend local regulations
that could better protect patients.

Further, it asked Jefferson's legislative delegation to enact state laws to
license pain clinics and associated pharmacies and to set up a database to
monitor narcotics prescriptions. Arkansas, Mississippi and Texas already
have such systems.

"Louisiana is surrounded by states who have this, and people are flocking
here for what I call a 'shake and bake' or 'driveby,' that these
establishments only sell these pain medications and only accept cash," said
Councilman-at-large John Young, who used to handle such cases as a local
prosecutor.

The council's move came after the arrests Tuesday of three pain clinic
doctors, including one from Metairie and one from Kenner, and the nurse who
owns the clinics on federal charges of conspiracy to illegally distribute
controlled substances.

Federal Drug Enforcement Administration officials, along with local
authorities, also shuttered three locations of Scherer's Medical Center,
including one in Metairie and one in Gretna, and four pharmacies, one
affiliated with the Metairie clinic and others in Kenner and Slidell.

The council's move mirrored similar measures taken recently by officials in
New Orleans, St. Bernard and St. Tammany parishes and in Slidell and Gretna
to establish moratoriums on new pain clinics and to consider tighter local
control of the specialized centers.

In Louisiana, all that is required to open a pain clinic are an
occupational license and a doctor who can prescribe narcotics and will sign
prescription forms, federal DEA spokesman Richard Woodfork said.

Jefferson Parish Sheriff Harry Lee told the council that his deputies have
investigated potential abuse at pain clinics for two years and said his
officers were part of Tuesday's sting that confiscated more than $10
million in assets from Cherlyn "Cookie" Armstrong, a registered nurse who
owns the Scherer's clinics.

Lee said he wouldn't "want to do anything that would dispel any doctors
from doing anything that would really provide a service to our residents."

But some doctors and pharmacists, he said, can earn a lot of money from
patients who suffer no pain but who can get a narcotics prescription after
paying $200 cash for a quick visit with a complicit doctor.

Shulin said her daughter found a doctor at Urgent Care of Metairie who
listened to the young woman's fabricated complaint of back pain, then gave
her prescriptions every month from November through March for 120 pills of
each of the three medications.

For the monthly visits, she paid $150 to $200 cash, Shulin said. For the
medicines, she paid about $40 per month.

A clinic employee who declined to give her name said Wednesday that the
prescribing doctor no longer works at the center. After listening to a
reporter recount Shulin's story, she said, "That was one reason that doctor
is no longer with us -- the way he was writing" prescriptions.

Woodfork said the DEA is aware of the doctor but "we don't have anything on
him."

Shulin, meanwhile, said she was pleased that local officials have joined
the regional push for oversight of pain clinics. But she had one
recommendation for officials who want to clamp down on the kind of
narcotics abuse that nearly killed her daughter:

"Close them all," she said. "They're legalized drug pushers. No questions.
Close them all."