Oxycontin Doc on Staggering Scale

A Cape Cod doctor who prescribed nearly one-third of the
painkiller OxyContin in all of Massachusetts in 2004 lost his license
to practice
medicine yesterday as state regulators declared him ”an immediate and
serious threat to the public safety and welfare."

Dr. Michael R. Brown, who practices in Sandwich, had been the target
of a protest earlier this month from parents calling him ”Dr. Feel Good" and
accusing him of overprescribing the addictive drug to children.

The emergency license suspension by the Board of Registration in Medicine
capped a week of deepening troubles for Brown, 52, who was arrested by
Sandwich police on Monday night on charges of buying back painkillers
he had prescribed to a patient.

At yesterday’s hearing in Boston, officials said, the board investigator
presented evidence that Brown was the single leading prescriber of OxyContin
in the entire state, with his prescriptions accounting for 288,859 of the
922,985 OxyContin tablets sold through pharmacies in 2004.

Yowza! No wonder he needed to be so heavily medicated. That’s over 791
tablets every day, including Saturdays, Sundays and holidays. The
guy was clearly suffering from repetitive stress injury.

How did we miss this guy, before he got popped? Perhaps our contacts
were protecting him for themselves. Actually, we don’t see what
all the fuss with oxycontin is all about. We’ll take an old-fashioned
dilaudid No.4 or a Bronfman cocktail anyday…..

from the Boston Globe