ADDICTS CONTINUE TO TELL ON GRAVES

At her lowest, when Sally Kimmons was injecting eight OxyContin pills a
day, she could not get high.

"You could hardly move. Your whole body hurt," Kimmons said.

She had diarrhea, nausea and a pounding headache.

"I got to the point where I didn't get high," Kimmons said. "I got sick."

Kimmons, a former patient, testified Tuesday in the trial of Dr. James
Graves. The Pace doctor is charged with manslaughter, racketeering and
unlawful delivery of a controlled substance.

The prosecution accuses Graves of prescribing a deadly mixture of
narcotics, dubbed the "Graves cocktail," to make money from dozens of
patients. Four of those people overdosed and died. Graves generally
prescribed OxyContin in two strengths, along with Lortab, Xanax and Soma.

The defense counters the patients were addicts who lied to Graves to get
the drugs they craved.

If convicted, Graves, 54, faces 15 to 30 years in prison. The trial is in
the Santa Rosa County courthouse before Circuit Judge Kenneth Bell.

Kimmons and her husband, Carl, went to Graves between October 1998 and
February 2000. Carl Kimmons had numerous health problems and died in March
2000.

Sally Kimmons said she was under the influence of OxyContin once or twice
when she went to see Graves. OxyContin is a powerful painkiller with a main
ingredient of oxycodone.

People who inject OxyContin crush the pills, mix them with water, heat it,
then inject the substance. They also have obvious needle marks in their arms.

Dozens of patients have testified Graves knew they were abusing drugs, yet
he continued to write prescriptions.

Angela Cabaniss, who went to Graves from July through November 1999, said
she reported Graves to the federal Drug Enforcement Administration after
one friend fatally overdosed from his prescriptions. Cabaniss said she was
addicted to methadone at the time.

"I'm an addict and whenever we hear there's a doctor who would write
something, we basically know what to say," Cabaniss said.

She knew 30 or 40 people who were patients of Graves.

"People were shooting dope; they were selling it," she testified. "It was
out of hand."

On cross examination, when defense attorney Mike Gibson asked Cabaniss why
she continued selling drugs if she was so distressed, she replied: "I
wouldn't have been able to sell them if he wasn't giving them to me."

She also admitted she complained to the DEA a few months after Graves
stopped filling prescriptions.

The trial is expected to last 2 more weeks.