EX-PATIENTS TESTIFY IN MEDICINE MILL TRIAL

Fort Pierce - One patient had legitimate back pain that quickly
became an addiction. The other had no pain and sought the pills
for the high.

Their stories were different, but both were drawn to Dr. Asuncion
Luyao for the same reasons -- her reputation as an easy source of pain
medication.

Two of her former patients were among the first witnesses to take the
stand Friday as Luyao's retrial began on charges of racketeering,
trafficking in oxycodone and manslaughter after a deadlocked jury in
her first trial in June.

"She was the seller and the demand was huge," Assistant State Attorney
Erin Kirkwood said in her opening statement.

Kirkwood led her argument with words Luyao, 64, allegedly told one
patient: "You'll be back. They all come back."

She showed how Luyao wrote prescriptions for oxycodone, hydrocodone,
morphine and other painkillers without doing full exams, ordering
extra tests or suggesting treatment plans.

The trafficking charges are based on visits by an undercover
investigator who lied about injuries and received painkillers without
proper medical records or further tests to find the source of his
pain. Kirkwood also summarized six deaths over 20 months that
constitute the manslaughter charges.

Racketeering, more commonly used in organized crime cases, applies
here because her Port St. Lucie office was a criminal enterprise and
the trafficking and manslaughter charges are the criminal acts
committed there, Kirkwood said.

Defense attorney Joel Hirschhorn countered that Florida law allows
doctors to prescribe painkillers, even to addicts, if they think they
are helping to treat pain. Luyao ran a small-town, storefront office
and kept much of the information she didn't write on charts in her
head because she knew her patients well, he said.

"She wasn't in the pharmacy business. She was in the pain care,
patient-protecting business," he said.

Hirschhorn went through the six manslaughter counts, but laid out
different reasons -- including natural causes and suicide -- that
could not be ruled out as possible causes of death. In the end, the
state's evidence is not enough to convict, he said.

"I suspect the state will not be able to fan it into a fire," he said
of the charges.

Both sides used the cases of her former patients to illustrate their
arguments, the prosecution saying their stories were evidence of
Luyao's nonexistent treatment while the defense said they showed she
was manipulated by the lies patients told.

Michael Callocchio, 44, said he was injured at work in a fall from a
truck in the late 1990s and eventually became addicted to the
OxyContin he was prescribed. He never had a problem getting
medication, even when he told her he was fresh out of rehab for his
pill abuse, and at one point received more than 1,500 pills in four
months.

Another patient, Christina Brown, had no ailments and came to Luyao
solely for the drugs. She described crushing OxyContin and injecting
it into her veins to get a quicker high.

The trial resumes Monday.