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Are doctors still going to be able to get away with prescribing hard drugs to celebrities?
By Steven Mikulan
TheWrap.com
The relationship between prescription-addicted celebrities and their Dr. Feelgoods is a time-honored tradition in Hollywood. For these enabling physicians, it's also been a relatively risk-free proposition, given that the worst punishments have been reprimands from state medical boards and revoked licenses. But as the drugs get deadlier, the act of prescribing them is also getting more risky.
While the cases of Anna Nicole Smith and Michael Jackson seem to follow the classic storyline, the difference now is that prosecutors are pursuing criminal charges -- and the state is reacting to their deaths by tightening the oversight mechanism of prescription drugs.
In an interview airing Wednesday, Janet Jackson blames Dr. Conrad Murray for her brother Michael's death, telling ABC News that the King of Pop's personal physician should not be allowed to practice medicine.
Anna Nicole Smith's death had already lit a fire under the issue, prompting the state to take measures that allow doctors to more closely monitor who's prescribing what to whom.
In March, Attorney General Jerry Brown announced the indictments of Smith's lawyer/boyfriend and two physicians at a melodramatic news conference, declaring that while Californians may believe drug dealers standing on street corners were bad, it was really "people in white smocks and pharmacies ... with their medical degrees who are a growing threat."
Brown's news conference may have sounded just a little like part of his stealth campaign for governor, but his office did follow up in September -- three months after Jackson's death -- by upgrading the Bureau of Narcotics Enforcement's system of tracking prescriptions.
More: Dr. Feelgoods and Their Celeb Patients: Who Needs Who? (PART 2)
The upgraded CURES (Controlled Substance Utilization Review and Evaluation System) now offers doctors instant online monitoring of their patients' prescriptions so that physicians will know if they are but one stop on a merry-go-round of prescription sources.
Unfortunately, there's still the problem of how to prosecute those who fill out the slips despite the safeguard.
"Doctors usually get prosecuted for giving narcotics without documentation and without examining their patients," veteran drug-case attorney Ronald Richards told TheWrap. Richards says that otherwise, district attorneys generally have a difficult time prosecuting Dr.
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