PATIENTS PRAISE, CONDEMN PHYSICIAN

Investigation Precedes Medical Board Hearing

To understand the legal and medical debate over the predicament of Dr.
Michael Huff, talk to Lisa Sage and Kirsten Sackett.

Sage went to Huff about five years ago because she was depressed. The
Oxnard pain specialist prescribed her 9 milligrams of Xanax per day, a
higher-than-normal dose.

The 45-year-old Ventura woman eventually tried to stop taking the
anti-anxiety drug. That's when the seizures began, and she nearly died. She
blames Huff for over-drugging her.

"He just basically ruined my life," said Sage, who still experiences what
she called mini-seizures and can't work or drive. "I'm just really messed up."

Sackett swears by Huff and can't believe Ventura County sheriff's
detectives are investigating him on suspicion of over-prescribing
OxyContin, a powerful painkiller with heroin-like effects, and trying to
link him to at least three overdose deaths.

When she lived in Oxnard, she saw Huff for depression and chronic asthma.
He also treated her for injuries she suffered in a car crash, and even
performed her son's circumcision. She now lives in Plainsboro, N.J.

"He literally saved my life a number of times," Sackett, 42, said. "He's an
excellent doctor."

For each complaint about Huff, there seem to be words of high praise to
match it. He's either a drug dealer in a suit or a panacea for the
pain-afflicted.

His prescription practices have caught the attention of investigators with
the Medical Board of California, who have suspended his license pending a
hearing Thursday in Sacramento.

Sheriff's investigators said they think he's dirty and hands out addictive
painkillers like they're after-dinner mints.

Through his attorney, Jim Farley, Huff declined a request for an interview.
Farley said his client has done nothing wrong and is a compassionate man
whom the authorities are unfairly targeting.

Earlier this year, Senior Deputy Victor Fazio filed a 95-page search
warrant affidavit outlining the investigation against Huff, who has not
been arrested nor charged with any crime.

Similar Cases

The legal precedent to decide if there will be a court case against Huff,
54, is all over the map.

In Florida, a doctor last year was sentenced to 63 years in prison after a
jury convicted him of manslaughter, unlawful delivery of a controlled
substance and racketeering.

Dr. James Graves was the nation's first physician to be convicted of
manslaughter or murder in an OxyContin-related death.

In Virginia, the U.S. Attorney's Office convicted four doctors of
over-prescribing painkillers. Two of them received 70-month prison terms.

Here in California -- a state where voters passed a medical marijuana law
- -- a doctor was eventually set free after facing three murder charges in
connection with OxyContin.

Dr. Frank Fisher ran a community health center in Redding and treated
dozens of pain patients in Shasta County.

In 1999, investigators with the state Attorney General's Office threw him
and a pharmacist in jail, set their bails at $15 million and accused them
of killing three people by giving them too much OxyContin.

Fisher sat in a cell for five months awaiting a preliminary hearing. After
a 21-day proceeding, the judge reduced the murder charges to manslaughter
and also ordered him to stand trial on fraud and conspiracy charges.

In January, the trial was set to begin when prosecutors said they lacked
key evidence to go forward. The judge dropped all the charges. The deputy
attorney general vowed to re-file the case, but has yet to do so, Fisher said.

"What it illustrates is they can come in and think they have a doctor and a
pharmacist who they think are the biggest drug dealers they've ever heard
of and accuse them of committing murder and conspiracy, and it turns out
they weren't," Fisher said in an interview this week.

Fisher put his story on the Internet as an example, he says, of overzealous
cops poking their noses into the medical community and making assumptions
about doctors who treat people in chronic pain.

"The guys we have regulating medicine are law enforcers," he said. "What
they're doing is fighting the drug war in the doctor's office."

Many of those who came to Fisher suffered from constant discomfort or
flat-out agony. One of those who died, Rebecca Williams, experienced
consistent back pain and was killed in a car crash in which her boyfriend
was driving.

A lab report suggested she had a large amount of OxyContin in her system
when she died, an amount so high she either tried to kill herself or the
report was a mistake, Fisher said. Either way, prosecutors charged the
doctor with her murder.

Another woman, Tamara Stevens, had severe digestive problems after an
operation to remove most of her intestines and "was basically living a
miserable existence," Fisher said. He prescribed her pain medication, and
she ended up overdosing and dying.

"Nobody wants to take care of these people because of the risk of
prosecution," he said. "There's a witch hunt on for pain doctors, and
people are suffering as a result."

Randy Ramseyer couldn't disagree more. The assistant U.S. attorney in
western Virginia has prosecuted many of the cases there that resulted in
convictions against doctors for over-prescribing OxyContin.

If anything, he said, putting away the corrupt doctors benefits those who
are prescribing correctly.

"The doctors that are legitimate like what we're doing because those kind
of doctors give them a bad name and give the whole profession a bad name,"
Ramseyer said.

In some of the Virginia cases, patients were snorting or injecting the
OxyContin, a sure sign of addiction. Yet they continued to receive
prescriptions, the prosecutor said.

'What's In It For Him?'

One of the main questions in the Huff investigation is why he would risk
his 23-year practice, if he really did anything wrong. In other words,
what's in it for him?

Ramseyer argued to his juries that the increase in business alone was
enough of an incentive for the doctors he put away. One even kept his
office open past midnight to cater to his clientele.

"It's a money thing, and it's a power thing," he said.

Nothing in the Huff search warrant affidavits suggests he did anything like
that, but some of his patients clearly exhibited signs of addiction that
were either missed or ignored.

A few told sheriff's detectives they had injected OxyContin, and some even
said Huff knew they were addicts but gave them the prescriptions anyway.

One man, Lloyd Hagmann, died of an overdose after Huff prescribed him 125
OxyContin pills per day, the highest dose the drug's manufacturer had ever
seen anywhere in the United States.

Sage drew the line when Huff tried to prescribe more than just the Xanax
she already was taking, she said. Each time Huff offered a new medication,
and Sage would argue against it, the doctor would say, "If you were a
diabetic, would you take insulin?" according to Sage.

"He was a nice man, but I think he was a terrible doctor," she said. "He
just shoved pills down people's throats like it was candy."

Sackett, on the other hand, still speaks to Huff regularly, even though she
now lives in New Jersey. She even has an appointment scheduled with him in
May, assuming the medical board lets him keep his license.

"I've never had a problem with him," she said. "I don't think he did
anything wrong."