DOCTOR ACCUSED OF RUNNING PILL MILL
AUTHORITIES CONNECT OFFICE TO 8 DEATHS

A Coral Springs physician who doled out more than a million addictive
painkillers, depressants and sleeping pills annually for several years
was arrested Thursday and accused of being a drug dealer.

Dr. Barbara Mazzella, 61, turned her nondescript office in a strip
shopping center into one of the nation's busiest pill mills, federal
agents said, charging patients $100 a visit or billing their insurance
for medical care she never gave.

At least eight of Mazzella's patients died of overdoses or suicides
using drugs she prescribed, and officials of the U.S. Drug Enforcement
Administration said they are investigating whether to charge her with
criminal responsibility for those deaths. South Florida medical
examiners also are reviewing two dozen other deaths or suicides
linked to her.

"Dr. Mazzella is a drug trafficker with a fancy degree," said Michael
Kane, associate special agent in charge at the Miami DEA office. "The
motive here was to make money."

Along with bona fide patients, she wrote larger than normal
prescriptions of addictive drugs for at least one convicted drug
dealer, for people she had never examined and for people out of state,
agents said. The drugs included narcotics such as dilaudid (medicinal
heroin) and Percodan, and depressants such as Valium and Seconal.

The parents of one of Mazzella's deceased patients, who asked that
they and their son not be named, said they were cheered by her arrest.

"She killed my son. She has killed a whole lot of people," the man's
father said. "All she did was want his money."

The Hollywood man, 43, died in November of an accidental overdose or
drug interaction. His parents said he had wrenched his back in a fall
on a construction site. Mild pain relievers from his regular doctor
did not help, so a friend sent him to Mazzella. His parents said he
came home with vials of pills. Two days before his death, Mazzella
gave him painkillers and sleeping pills, arrest records said.

"She got him addicted," the man's mother said. "The way she was giving
them, she didn't care. She didn't even take his blood pressure."

Mazzella declined to comment while being arrested. But her office
manager, Jay Lenoble, strongly defended her as a savior to people in
pain from back problems, AIDS and cancer.

"They do deserve the drugs they are getting," Lenoble said. "She's
making these people functional and (able) to work. What these people
do when they leave here is up to them. We can't watch every patient
that comes out of here. But what she does is correct."

Her attorney, Jeff Harris, said she denied wrongdoing.

"She obviously is a physician in good standing in the community and
has not broken any laws," Harris said. "The charges are serious, but
they are unproven."

The doctor, who lives in a Parkland house valued at $320,000, was
jailed in Miami pending a bond hearing Tuesday. She was charged with
federal counts of illegal drug sales, conspiracy to sell drugs and
scheming to defraud Medicare, Medicaid and private insurance.

Officers from the DEA, FBI and Coral Springs police raided Mazzella's
office at 8:30 a.m., taking her out in handcuffs and seizing records.
Across the street is a bar that she and her family own, Doc's Rx Tavern.

DEA agents said they began investigating Mazzella four years ago due
to complaints from local pharmacists who were alarmed by the volume of
controlled substances she was prescribing.

People would pay $100 cash and get a prescription with little or no
medical examination, the DEA said in court documents. A patient could
pick up prescriptions for several people at a time by paying $100 for
each name. One convicted drug dealer, David Manger, got 5,400 pills in
1997, according to the documents.

When virtually all drugstores stopped taking her business, Mazzella
brought in a pharmacist to set up shop inside her office in January
1997. Don's Clinic Pharmacy, owned by Donald Arneson of Pompano Beach,
handled only her patients and stocked little more than the drugs
Mazzella favored, agents said in court documents.