PIONEER OF RAPID DRUG DETOX PROCEDURE COULD LOSE LICENSE

New Jersey Doctor, Employee Face Trial

MERCHANTVILLE, N.J. -- Dr. Lance Gooberman has devoted his medical practice
to perfecting "rapid opiate detoxification," designed to reduce the agony
of drug withdrawal and get more addicts into recovery.

Himself a recovering addict long drug-free, Gooberman said his practice --
which unlike similar rapid detox programs doesn't require a hospital stay
- -- has detoxified about 2,350 patients during seven years and guided them
into long-term recovery programs.

But during four years, seven of his patients died within days of the
procedure. Gooberman said they had undetected heart problems or took
cocaine, triggering a heart attack.

In a civil trial beginning Wednesday, state regulators will try to strip
Gooberman and his former employee, Dr. David Bradway, of their medical
licenses.

"We just want to make sure these 'cutting-edge treatments' aren't cutting
off life," said Mark Herr, director of New Jersey's Division of Consumer
Affairs, which oversees the state board regulating physicians.

Gooberman and his attorney, John Sitzler, have lined up medical experts to
testify that accepted medical standards were followed and that Gooberman's
procedure was not the cause of any patient's death.

Sitzler said the patients' death rate was 0.3 percent, lower than for many
surgical procedures, and that outpatient procedures involving anesthesia
are commonly performed in physicians' offices.

Gooberman's program, U.S. Detox Inc., uses medications to rapidly flush the
opiate drugs -- heroin, morphine, methadone and prescription painkillers --
out of addicts' bodies to ease withdrawal symptoms such as diarrhea and
tremors. The patients are anesthetized during the approximately four-hour
procedure in his office.

He then implants a pellet of medicine in the abdomen that prevents patients
from "getting high" if they take opiate drugs during the crucial first two
months of recovery.

"I'm just trying to come up with a better way to do detox," Gooberman said.

Gooberman, 49, for years was addicted to the stimulant methamphetamine but
says he has been drug-free for 14 years after a six-week stay in a hospital
psychiatric unit triggered by a drug binge.

Rapid opiate detoxification was first performed in the late 1980s in
Europe. Gooberman and other doctors who pioneered it in this country have
appeared on television talk shows and magazine programs praising the
method. The procedure also has been depicted on TV medical dramas.

At least a dozen U.S. physicians perform variations on rapid detox, but at
a hospital and with an overnight stay required.

Some have published articles in medical journals indicating many more
patients were drug-free after six months than with traditional
detoxification programs. And a handful of insurance plans have begun paying
for the procedure.

But even doctors who perform rapid detoxification say it stresses addicts'
ravaged bodies, and at least a dozen of the thousands of American and
European patients who underwent the procedure at a hospital also died. The
slower programs, traditional detoxification and initiating methadone
maintenance therapy, also have been documented to kill some patients.

New Jersey's attorneys are expected to stress that Gooberman and Bradway
are the only doctors known to perform detoxification as an outpatient
procedure.

The state alleges, among other things, that the doctors did not have a
sufficiently trained support staff and adequate emergency equipment, warn
patients enough about the method's risks or properly instruct the caregiver
taking the patient home. The doctors deny all of that.

Rapid opiate detoxification has been approved by the professional
organization for doctors in their specialty, the American Society for
Addiction Medicine, as long as it's "performed by adequately trained staff
with access to appropriate medical equipment," said the society's executive
vice president, James F. Callahan.

The experts do agree on one thing: More research is needed. Under a grant
from the National Institute on Drug Abuse, the first national trial
comparing rapid detox with two forms of slow detoxification began in
September and is to last three years.