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On the Opioid Beat (Gwen Moritz Editor’s Note)

4 min read

I hope by now you’ve taken a deep dive into our incomparable Senior Editor Mark Friedman’s Jan. 14 article on all the chances that the Arkansas State Medical Board has given a Harrison doctor. James Hawk’s medical license has been suspended since June, for the third time since 2012, after the board received more complaints that he overprescribed painkillers, the public health scourge of our time.

Painkiller prescriptions were central to his 2014 license suspension as well. Dr. Judy McDonald, an experienced Garland County physician who was hired to fill in for Hawk during that suspension, left after a few days, concluding that she had stumbled into a “drug mill.”

But Hawk got his license back that time after shifting the blame to five women who worked in his clinic. (One pleaded guilty to a misdemeanor; three others were acquitted at trial and the charges against the fifth were dropped.)

Friedman’s story, which was as much about the generosity of the medical board as about yet another pill-pushing physician, was published on the same day The New York Times reported on disturbing new data from the National Safety Council: “The opioid crisis in the United States has become so grim that Americans are now likelier to die of an overdose than in a vehicle crash.”

The statistics in that report were from 2017, the year that the number of overdose deaths topped 70,000. By contrast, there are about 40,000 auto fatalities per year, despite an increase believed to be related to distracted driving. At its height in the mid-90s, the AIDS epidemic killed about 40,000 Americans a year.

Not nearly all of the opioid deaths last year were caused by prescription drugs; 40 percent (more than 28,000) were blamed on fentanyl or related drugs. But the rise in deaths from illegal opioids took off just as opioid prescriptions began to come off their 2010 peak. It turns out that more careful prescribing guidelines don’t fix pre-existing dependency, and illegal replacements are even more deadly.

The next day came more disturbing news on the opioid beat (which really is a thing at several large news organizations): The Wall Street Journal reported on internal emails uncovered by civil litigation against Purdue Pharma, the maker of OxyContin, the leading edge of the current generation of prescription narcotics.

“I had hoped for better results,” Richard Sackler, a director and member of Purdue’s controlling family, wrote in 2011 after learning that weekly prescriptions had doubled forecasts. “What else more can we do to energize the sales and grow at a faster rate?”

That was a decade after deaths started to attract law enforcement attention. Sackler committed to email his idea for addressing that inconvenience: “We have to hammer on the abusers in every way possible. They are the culprits and the problem. They are reckless criminals.”

Yes, a man whose family fortune has grown to an estimated $13 billion by selling OxyContin was content to blame addicts and eager to sell ever more of what was killing them. Comparisons to “El Chapo,” the Mexican drug lord currently on trial in New York, seem less hyperbolic when you remember that (as the Los Angeles Times uncovered in 2016) Purdue encouraged doctors to prescribe stronger, more addictive doses when it became clear that the miracle painkiller didn’t last 12 hours as advertised.

That phenomenon could explain something Dr. McDonald observed at Dr. Hawk’s clinic: “Most of the patients that I saw were on the maximum dosage of whatever they were on. They would be so high that they just boggled my mind.”


El Chapo’s net worth is estimated at about a third of the Sackler family’s.


I’m starting to detect a pattern: Like Dr. Hawk, Richard Johns, the former Little Rock physician now in federal prison for writing hundreds of fraudulent prescriptions, also had a habit of blaming the women in his office when he started to feel any heat.

Two of Johns’ nurses were put on professional probation by the state Board of Nursing as a result of his complaints. Meanwhile, he kept his license despite numerous complaints to the State Medical Board — until a young Cabot man died and the investigation led straight to Johns.


The worst part of writing about opioid deaths is anticipating the number of readers I’ll hear from who have lost a loved one to this scourge. It happens every time.


Email Gwen Moritz, editor of Arkansas Business, at GMoritz@ABPG.com and follow her on Twitter at @gwenmoritz.
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