DOCTOR'S BEHAVIOR JUST LIKE THAT OF A STREET DEALER

The sentencing this week of a former Roseboro doctor for his role in
selling prescribed drugs to patients who, medically speaking, didn't need
them is disturbing on many levels.

The most obvious, of course, is the fact that Perry Reese, a once licensed
physician, used his profession as a backdrop for the sale of the
prescription drugs Oxycontin and Percocet. He was little more than a street
dealer plying his trade in an office that was little more than a haven for
the illegal activity he was conducting.

Reese took cash, jewelry and a laundry list of other items in exchange for
providing patients with 20, 30 or 45 pills at a time, feeding their
addiction and battering the oath he took when he became a doctor.

That Reese was able to get away with it for so long is cause for pause; the
realization that his little side business might still be going on if one of
his own patients hadn't turned him is frightening. If that patient hadn't
approached the State Bureau of Investigation, more patients would likely
only have become more and more addicted than they were when they first
sought his help in acquiring pills they neither needed nor should have been
able to get.

Disturbing, too, are the victims, themselves, individuals who saw no
problem with seeking the doctor's help in securing drugs they knew they
wouldn't ever get under normal -- and legal -- circumstances.

While there's no question Reese should have been made to pay for his very
illegal and very unethical behavior, one must question why these patients
haven't been brought to justice as well.

After all, what is the real difference between these individuals and any
number of users who approach a dealer, cash in hand, to secure marijuana,
cocaine or meth?

The answer: there is no difference, except perhaps that one often utilizes
cloak of darkness or hidden alleys to score their fix; these individuals
used a doctor's office.

In many ways, what patients did in seeking to scratch their itch was far
worse than any other drug abuser. They used a place where healing is
supposed to occur and medical care delivered as no more than a conduit for
illegal activity.

And they knew full well when they sought the Oxycontin or Percocet,
exchanged cash or other items for a number of pills and never once had to
take a prescription to a pharmacy they were doing something that wasn't
within the law.

Patients who repeatedly sought out Reese's brand of medicine in many ways
are as guilty as he is.

Reese, of course, was held to a higher standard. After all, he took an oath
to care for patients, to prescribe medications as needed based on medical
conditions and to live within the laws he promised to uphold.

He failed on all three counts and, the 20 years in federal prison he was
sentenced to earlier this week proves that the three stirkes didn't just
put him out, they put him where he needs to be for a very long time.