CHENEY DISMISSES DOCTOR WHO HAS DRUG ADDICTION

WASHINGTON -- One of Vice President Dick Cheney's physicians, for
years a prominent spokesman on the vice president's health, has been
dropped from his medical team and is battling an addiction to
prescription drugs.

The doctor, internist Gary Malakoff, was relieved last month as
chairman of George Washington University Medical Center's general
internal medicine division, The New Yorker magazine reported in its
current issue. It said Malakoff was battling an addiction to
prescription drugs in 2000, the same time he treated Cheney for the
most recent of his four heart attacks and then declared the vice
president "up to the task of the most sensitive public office."

Cheney's first heart attack occurred in 1978, when he was 37 years
old. He suffered other attacks in 1984, 1988, and 2000, and had
quadruple-bypass surgery after his third attack. He has twice
undergone minimally invasive procedures to open blocked arteries, and
a cardiac defibrillator, which monitors his heart rhythm and adjusts
it if necessary, was implanted in his chest, in June 2001.

According to The New Yorker, Malakoff has been enrolled since 1999 in
a drug treatment program run by the Medical Society of the District of
Columbia. The society determined that Malakoff was not fit to see
patients, and he was put on leave until September.

Kevin Kellems, Cheney's press secretary, said yesterday that Malakoff
was no longer treating the vice president but did not explain why.