The most obvious, of course, is the fact that Perry Reese, a once licensed physician, used his profession as a backdrop for the sale of the prescription drugs Oxycontin and Percocet. He was little more than a street dealer plying his trade in an office that was little more than a haven for the illegal activity he was conducting.
Reese took cash, jewelry and a laundry list of other items in exchange for providing patients with 20, 30 or 45 pills at a time, feeding their addiction and battering the oath he took when he became a doctor.
That Reese was able to get away with it for so long is cause for pause; the realization that his little side business might still be going on if one of his own patients hadn’t turned him is frightening. If that patient hadn’t approached the State Bureau of Investigation, more patients would likely only have become more and more addicted than they were when they first sought his help in acquiring pills they neither needed nor should have been able to get.
Disturbing, too, are the victims, themselves, individuals who saw no problem with seeking the doctor’s help in securing drugs they knew they wouldn’t ever get under normal — and legal — circumstances.
While there’s no question Reese should have been made to pay for his very illegal and very unethical behavior, one must question why these patients haven’t been brought to justice as well.
After all, what is the real difference between these individuals and any number of users who approach a dealer, cash in hand, to secure marijuana, cocaine or meth?
The answer: there is no difference, except perhaps that one often utilizes cloak of darkness or hidden alleys to score their fix; these individuals used a doctor’s office.
In many ways, what patients did in seeking to scratch their itch was far worse than any other drug abuser. They used a place where healing is supposed to occur and medical care delivered as no more than a conduit for illegal activity.
And they knew full well when they sought the Oxycontin or Percocet, exchanged cash or other items for a number of pills and never once had to take a prescription to a pharmacy they were doing something that wasn’t within the law.
Patients who repeatedly sought out Reese’s brand of medicine in many ways are as guilty as he is.
Reese, of course, was held to a higher standard. After all, he took an oath to care for patients, to prescribe medications as needed based on medical conditions and to live within the laws he promised to uphold.
He failed on all three counts and, the 20 years in federal prison he was sentenced to earlier this week proves that the three stirkes didn’t just put him out, they put him where he needs to be for a very long time.
It requires little insight to conclude that attempting to prosecute Reese's patients would be a hugely expensive exercise in futility. Can you imagine the difficulty in proving, years after the fact, that a specific prescription constituted criminal behavior on the patient's part? The mere fact of having received a narcotics prescription from Reese isn't a crime. Investigating this matter would necessitate intruding on the privacy of many legitimate patients. Finally, what good would be served if a few pill addicts could be convicted of small-time offenses? Taxpayers aren't interested in having the criminal justice system waste time and resources on such frivolous fishing expeditions.
Editor, if you really think investigating these patients would worthwhile, I challenge you to voluntarily make your own medical records an open book for anyone to rummage through for evidence of improprieties that might be prosecutable. If it turns out that you ever got a prescription from a doc who was later found to be misprescribing, good luck defending yourself.