The Price for a Pill

THE OXYCONTIN TRIAL

Sleep is slow to come for the doctor's mother and troubled when it
arrives. Alone in her house, in the dark, she wonders how the boy she
raised became a man she doesn't recognize.

"I wake up at night, and it's the first thing I think about," Dot
Woodward says, "and sometimes it takes me two hours to go back to sleep."

Woodward last saw her son in August, and when she did visit, they were
separated by glass and wood, like a theater ticket-taker and a
moviegoer. That's how they talked, too, by microphone, like she was
his customer. The guards at the jail wouldn't let her hug him. Not
even a touch.

Her husband is dead. Her oldest son is dead. Michael is the only
family left to her, and now he's locked up for illegally prescribing
narcotics to junkies and laundering his millions in ill-gotten gain.

"I have no idea what's going on," Dot Woodward says. "He never has
explained. You wouldn't believe what I have been through last summer
and this winter."

'Hillbilly Heroin'

The doctor's mother has been protected from the news about him because
she lives in northwestern Georgia in the same town where she and
husband, Mack, raised their sons.

But on the Grand Strand, reports about Michael Woodward have been in
the newspapers and on TV broadcasts. He has become well known as the
pain doctor who dispensed thousands of doses of OxyContin from his
clinic, Comprehensive Care and Pain Management Center, in Myrtle Beach
and then pleaded guilty and testified against his former partners in
the hope of lighter punishment. A New York Times article about
OxyContin focused on Woodward and his clinic.

He wrote so many prescriptions out of his pain management clinic that
it caught the attention of federal agents and the sales department of
Purdue Pharma, the Connecticut pharmaceutical company that
manufactures OxyContin. For a while, Myrtle Beach was the national
capital for OxyContin, known among dealers and users as "hillbilly
heroin."

Police describe Woodward as a drug dealer and a cheat, whose fellow
doctors said they feared for their safety if they crossed him. But
this is not the person Dot Woodward raised.

She doesn't deny her son's guilt. She simply can't comprehend his
crime. To her, he was the son who pestered his father about precision
on tax returns.

"He was a fanatic over, 'Do everything right. Don't do anything
wrong,'" she says. "I have accepted it, but I cannot figure out why or
how he got into this mess. He was never a troublemaker. To my
knowledge, he never even had a speeding ticket."

Whatever his troubles, Woodward was able to keep them from his
72-year-old mother. When he moved to Florida, after federal agents
closed his clinic in June 2001, he told his mother he was escaping the
pressures of his profession. "I kept saying, 'When are you going back
in practice or become CEO of a hospital?'" she says.

His answer was always that he wanted to spend more time with his three
children: a son, 10, and daughters, 9 and 7. Dot Woodward learned of
the indictment in June through a telephone call from Jill Woodward,
her daughter-in-law. "She called me the day he was arrested. I broke
down, and I cried for about a week."

Finally, a Doctor

Michael Woodward was studious, the valedictorian of the class of 1975
at LaFayette High School. He played baritone in the high-school band.
After high school, he and his friends formed Valholla, a band that
played in local clubs.

He announced in high school that he wanted to be a doctor. Mack and
Dot Woodward, who owned a construction company, were generous with
their sons, she says. Upon Michael's high-school graduation, they
bought him a Chevy sports car; in college they bought him another new
Chevy. They bought him a Mercury Cougar for medical school.

By the time the medical school at the Mercer University admitted him,
Woodward already had earned his Master of Business Administration and
a law degree from the University of Georgia at Athens.

"He tried seven or eight years before he was accepted," his mother
says.

Woodward finished medical school in 1989, specializing in neurology.
Through Yale University's School of Medicine, he served his internship
and residency at hospitals in Connecticut, according to his
application to practice medicine in South Carolina.

Although he was licensed in Georgia, South Carolina is the only state
where he has practiced medicine. He applied for his license May 16,
1993. One section of the application requires fingerprints and a
sample of handwriting; the applicant is asked to describe, in his
handwriting, why he wants to be a doctor in South Carolina.

Woodward's reply, in part, said: "I ... plan to offer the best care
possible to the people of the community."

His mother never has seen a change in his personality, nothing that
would have predicted or could explain his criminal activity, she says,
but his older brother's sudden death of pancreatitis at age 26 took a
toll.

Whatever he became, she says, his motives were pure. "I don't really
think it was altogether the money," she says. "It was just in his
heart that he wanted to be a doctor and help people."

Trouble and More Trouble

In the end, Woodward helped himself to millions of dollars, handed out
lots of narcotics and made OxyContin affordable for the recreational
user.

When the DEA shut the clinic down in June 2001, it wasn't the first
time he had been in trouble. Within four years of his arrival in
Myrtle Beach, the state Board of Medical Examiners revoked Woodward's
license because of allegations he had an improper relationship with a
woman patient and for overprescribing narcotics.

A judge reversed the revocation. But a year later, in November 1998,
the board again yanked his license, only to have a judge order another
hearing. In November 2001, Woodward gave up his license and promised
he would never again apply to practice medicine in South Carolina; in
return, the board dropped the charge, which was lodged in 1996.

When the board first revoked his license in 1997, the federal
indictment against him alleges, Woodward already was illegally
prescribing drugs and cheating the Medicare system out of thousands of
dollars.

William E. Day II, the assistant U.S. attorney who prosecuted the
OxyContin case in Florence, said witnesses had painted Woodward as an
intimidating figure. The cache of 21 guns, including at least five
AK-47 military-style weapons, and the 17,000 rounds of ammunition
investigators confiscated from Woodward's office, enhanced the
perception that he might be dangerous. In rebuffing Woodward's
lawyers' request to reduce his $250,000 bond, Judge Thomas Rogers III
said: "The mere existence of these guns does give me concern."

In his agreement to plead guilty, Woodward admitted he had used or
intended to use the weapons in his criminal enterprise.

Still, the Woodward he met, Day says, was not threatening. "The side I
saw of him was easy to get along with, very cooperative. He's
extremely intelligent ... very pleasant. He wasn't the least bit
hostile. A lot of people had been afraid of him and his temper, but I
didn't see that."

At least $6 million went through the clinic, Day says, and little of
it was legitimate.

Woodward testified at the trial of his former employees that, in the
beginning, his practice was on the up-and-up. However, Woodward later
testified the clinic became a "pill mill."

Agents arrested Woodward in Florida in June, and he's been in jail
since. He pleaded guilty to three reduced charges in January with a
maximum penalty of 20 years for each. But the judge won't sentence
Woodward until the federal government completes all its
investigations. "We're still talking to him," Day says.

Man of Mystery

Doreen Beal, who became Woodward's 88th patient after he opened here,
went to the clinic to seek relief from migraine headaches. For about
five years, he prescribed painkillers less potent than OxyContin. But
for the last two years of his practice, he prescribed three
80-milligram-tablets of OxyContin per day, as well as Soma and Valium.

He was always a gentleman, Beal says, and was more gentle with spinal
taps than any doctor she has seen. "We joked with him all the time,"
she says. "I used to tell him he was the Pillsbury Doughboy."

She went to his clinic until investigators closed it.

To most people, a list that now includes his mother, Woodward is an
ambiguity. He was flirty, according to waitresses at the cafe two
doors down from his clinic, but otherwise they knew little about him.

His wife, Jill, who lives in Florida with their three children,
declined a request for an interview.

"It's not over yet," she says. "If I said anything to hurt him, I
could never forgive myself."

Bill Watkins, his lawyer in Columbia, did not respond to several
messages left by The Sun News. Attempts to interview Woodward failed.
The lawyer representing several clients in a lawsuit against Woodward
did not return telephone calls. The principal at his high school in
LaFayette, Ga., declined to even confirm Woodward had attended there
or that he was the 1975 class valedictorian.

His mother, though, talked freely, as if in speaking she could reach
comprehension. Heartache and bewilderment was evident in her voice. In
the decade Woodward lived on the Grand Strand, she only visited him
twice.

"We were an average American family," Dot Woodward says. "We got along
real well."

This Christmas was her worst - even worse, she says, than the first
one after her other son died.

"It was like a nightmare. I did no decorations. Nothing. I was here
all alone. It was just another day to me."

So she lies awake in her bed. The facts she doesn't know keep her
awake nights as much as the facts she does know.

"I don't know the whole story. I don't see the papers. When he calls
me from jail, he tells me he doesn't have time to talk about it
because others need to use the telephone. I think he's embarrassed to
talk about it."

She has seen him only once in the past year: that day in the jail
visiting room. For that, she drove 1,000 miles round trip. "Mom, I
really don't like the idea of you coming over here," Woodward told
her.

"Finally, I said, 'Michael, I'm coming to see you regardless of what
you say.' He was my baby, and he'll always be."