WHEN DOCTORS GET PATIENTS HOOKED

If there were any way I could stand on my head and yell hallelujah in
print, that's what I would be doing right now.

I couldn't believe my eyes when I saw an ad in the May 23 issue of the
Times seeking witnesses regarding Dr. Bruce Feldman.

The ad was placed by an attorney, representing two former patients who
are bringing malpractice suits against the doctor for prescribing
narcotic drugs that they claim resulted in addiction.

I've nothing personal against Feldman, who, at this point, is merely
being accused, but I've waited a long time to see someone who might
think it worthwhile to set a precedent that would hold doctors
responsible if they have addicted their patients to drugs.

In my lifetime, I've known many heroin addicts who have claimed they
were originally addicted to drugs by doctors. For quite a while, for
years sometimes, they were able to continue their escalating
addictions through legal prescriptions.

But then the narcotics investigators would get wind of it, often
through routine pharmacy checks, and intervene with the doctors. The
patients would be immediately and brutally cut off, left to their own
devices to feed their growing habits on the streets.

In January 1988, I interviewed a woman who has since died from AIDS.
She also claimed she was addicted to drugs through a very real injury,
then tossed out into the streets by her doctor.

Her doctor was not Feldman; prescription addiction started in this
area long before Feldman came to town.

I've kept her story and somehow it feels like it deserves to be told
again. I can assure you, as an active junkie with the HIV-virus, not
too many people listened to her back then. But perhaps someone will
hear her now and learn from her experience.

At the age of 36, Alison (not her real name) had been clean for almost
two years. She had recently tested positive for the HIV virus and she
was suffering from pneumonia and chronic lung infections.

She wanted to talk about how she had become addicted to heroin, via
the route of legal prescriptions for pain.

I'd known her since she was 9, and I still remember her well. She was
an attractive woman, with brown hair and brown eyes. She always wore
her gold earrings, chains and rings. Her voice was hoarse. She chained
smoked Winston 100s. Her nails were bitten to the quick. And she had
gained 40 pounds since getting clean.

Alison had been involved in a car accident in the spring of 1972. Her
car had a defective A-frame and she simply lost control of it.

She had broken her left arm in five places and had 27 stitches sewn
into her shattered right cheek. She had also crushed two vertebrae in
her back and broken her nose.

Following her release from Addison Gilbert Hospital, her doctor sent
her home with a prescription for 50 Percoset and 100 Valium, which he
refilled every month for a long time.

She said she'd ask the doctor about getting off the scripts
occasionally, but he continued giving them to her.

After a while, she needed five, then 10, then 15 Percosets to feel no
pain. And she started going to other doctors because she needed more
pills than the original prescriptions would give her.

To her doctor's credit, he wouldn't give her more but he certainly
didn't withdraw her from what she was taking.

She knew which doctors to go to. They have reputations, some are
easier than others for getting prescriptions, she said.

"I'd wake up to five," she said. "I was eating them, eating them,
eating them." She was taking up to 40 a day at one point.

In 1982, she was arrested for "working" the doctors. When she got
busted, her doctor cut her off from her prescriptions. She knew she
was strung out on the Percosets and her doctor knew it, too, she said.
But he didn't offer much help.

"When I needed help, my doctor wouldn't help me," she said. "He was my
regular medical doctor. I think there are doctors who make junkies out
of people and I'll say it to the day I die."

In 1982, after the bust, she went to her cousin's house to buy some
Percoset. She knew her cousin was getting 100 a month.

But her cousin had none, and "stupid me, I put my arm out and let her
inject" heroin, she said. In a matter of seconds, she felt better.

"It's that quick," she said, snapping her fingers. "It's real easy
when you're sick."

And so began her fast track to an early death.

One time, her husband came into $93,000 and she took $3,000 off the
top and got five people high for three days.

She started selling Percoset on the streets, making $3,000 to $4,000 a
week, to buy heroin. She was also buying six-packs, a combination of
codeine and Duridan for $10, and selling them for $50.

She sold her diamond ring for $300 to buy heroin. Soon after that,
when she wanted three bags of heroin and only had enough money for
two, she gave up her diamond wedding band for the third bag. And a
local storekeeper allowed her to trade $4,000 worth of jewelry for
$600 to keep her in drug money.

In 1986, she was busted. She weighed in at 90 pounds. Her hair was
gray. And her liver was shot.

"I was trying to keep clean on my own, substituting drugs, and I
couldn't do it," she said.

She believed Kenny Ryan could be very hard on drug addicts when he
wanted to be, but she also believed he didn't like to see people
ruined by drugs, either.

In fact, Ryan, a narcotics detective, laid it all out for her when she
was busted, telling her she was ruining her life and should get help
before she ended up in jail -- which was where she was headed.

"He (Ryan) knows my doctor made a junkie out of me. No one is your
friend in that life. I'm glad they raided me. It made me do what I
did," she said of getting straight.

"Doctors like him should be held responsible. The doctor never
explained it was addictive," she said, adding the doctors don't get
screwed, the patients do.

After she was busted, she couldn't even stand up in court. She went to
Doctors Hospital in Worcester, as part of the arrest, and she got clean.

She came home in March 1986. In April, she started having sore throats
and she was very tired. She tested positive for AIDS.

"Even now," she chuckled, "I've had to say no to doctors who have
offered me Xanex for anxiety." It seems they thought it was OK to be
an addict if you had the virus, she said.

Well, "what goes around comes around. If I only live to see it,"
another deceased friend of mine used to say.

My faith tells me, Alison can see it.