Pubdate: Thu, 14 Apr 2005
Source: Times-Picayune, The (LA)
960 1.xml
Copyright: 2005 The Times-Picayune
Contact:  http://www.nola.com/t-p/
Details: http://www.mapinc.org/media/848
Author: Michelle Krupa
Bookmark: http://www.mapinc.org/find?232 (Chronic Pain)

OVERDOSES PROMPT BAN ON CLINICS

'Close Them All,' One Mother Urges

The night before she watched her daughter's pupils roll skyward and 
strained to understand the young woman's mumbling, Dawn Shulin saw a TV 
news report about a St. Bernard man who died from an overdose of narcotics 
prescribed at a pain clinic.

The next morning, Shulin's 22-year-old daughter could not stand up. She 
could not focus her eyes. And she could not answer how many of the pills 
she got from a pain clinic on Veterans Memorial Boulevard -- 120 each of 
Vicodin, Lortab and Soma -- she took before she went to bed.

"It was ironic," Shulin said, recalling the April 5 incident. "I've been 
watching this story on television . . . Monday night, and my daughter was 
rushed to the hospital Tuesday morning."

The young woman was admitted to Kenner Regional Medical Center's intensive 
care ward. It would be two days before she regained consciousness, her 
mother said.

But the end of that ordeal set off a pair of new ones for Shulin: scraping 
together $40,000 to send her uninsured daughter to a 30-day drug 
rehabilitation program, and begging public officials to close down the kind 
of pain clinics that helped feed her daughter's addiction.

Jefferson Parish Council Chairman Tom Capella said it was Shulin's call, 
along with another last week from a mother whose daughter died after an 
overdose of narcotics prescribed at a pain clinic, that sparked a measure 
the council passed unanimously Wednesday to halt for six months the 
establishment of new pain clinics.

The resolution also assigned the parish's Health Services Task Force to 
study potential abuses by pain clinics and to recommend local regulations 
that could better protect patients.

Further, it asked Jefferson's legislative delegation to enact state laws to 
license pain clinics and associated pharmacies and to set up a database to 
monitor narcotics prescriptions. Arkansas, Mississippi and Texas already 
have such systems.

"Louisiana is surrounded by states who have this, and people are flocking 
here for what I call a 'shake and bake' or 'driveby,' that these 
establishments only sell these pain medications and only accept cash," said 
Councilman-at-large John Young, who used to handle such cases as a local 
prosecutor.

The council's move came after the arrests Tuesday of three pain clinic 
doctors, including one from Metairie and one from Kenner, and the nurse who 
owns the clinics on federal charges of conspiracy to illegally distribute 
controlled substances.

Federal Drug Enforcement Administration officials, along with local 
authorities, also shuttered three locations of Scherer's Medical Center, 
including one in Metairie and one in Gretna, and four pharmacies, one 
affiliated with the Metairie clinic and others in Kenner and Slidell.

The council's move mirrored similar measures taken recently by officials in 
New Orleans, St. Bernard and St. Tammany parishes and in Slidell and Gretna 
to establish moratoriums on new pain clinics and to consider tighter local 
control of the specialized centers.

In Louisiana, all that is required to open a pain clinic are an 
occupational license and a doctor who can prescribe narcotics and will sign 
prescription forms, federal DEA spokesman Richard Woodfork said.

Jefferson Parish Sheriff Harry Lee told the council that his deputies have 
investigated potential abuse at pain clinics for two years and said his 
officers were part of Tuesday's sting that confiscated more than $10 
million in assets from Cherlyn "Cookie" Armstrong, a registered nurse who 
owns the Scherer's clinics.

Lee said he wouldn't "want to do anything that would dispel any doctors 
from doing anything that would really provide a service to our residents."

But some doctors and pharmacists, he said, can earn a lot of money from 
patients who suffer no pain but who can get a narcotics prescription after 
paying $200 cash for a quick visit with a complicit doctor.

Shulin said her daughter found a doctor at Urgent Care of Metairie who 
listened to the young woman's fabricated complaint of back pain, then gave 
her prescriptions every month from November through March for 120 pills of 
each of the three medications.

For the monthly visits, she paid $150 to $200 cash, Shulin said. For the 
medicines, she paid about $40 per month.

A clinic employee who declined to give her name said Wednesday that the 
prescribing doctor no longer works at the center. After listening to a 
reporter recount Shulin's story, she said, "That was one reason that doctor 
is no longer with us -- the way he was writing" prescriptions.

Woodfork said the DEA is aware of the doctor but "we don't have anything on 
him."

Shulin, meanwhile, said she was pleased that local officials have joined 
the regional push for oversight of pain clinics. But she had one 
recommendation for officials who want to clamp down on the kind of 
narcotics abuse that nearly killed her daughter:

"Close them all," she said. "They're legalized drug pushers. No questions. 
Close them all."
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