To many of his patients, he was the savior who rescued them from the misery of unbearable pain, but to others, he was an amoral drug dealer who played fast and loose with people’s lives.
The story of William Hurwitz’s imprisonment for excessively prescribing painkillers is emblematic of the US’ burgeoning opioid crisis and the dilemma it presents doctors seeking to manage pain responsibly.
Dr Feelgood, which premiered last week at the Los Angeles Film Festival, examines what has been described as the worst drug crisis in US history through the lens of Hurwitz’s trial in 2004 for trafficking.
Photo: AFP
“He is a demon — what he has done to my family and the other families,” said Paul Nye, whose wife overdosed on the potent opioid OxyContin and died.
“He gave her 200 OxyContin pills the first time she saw him. Two weeks later he doubled that, two weeks later something like four times that,” added Nye, whose his wife had been suffering from back pain.
The documentary follows the physician’s run-ins with the authorities, his conviction in 2004, his appeal and the retrial that saw his 25-year prison sentence reduced to four years.
However, it also lays bare the quandary for doctors duty-bound to relieve pain and yet required by law to take into account the possible ill effects of over-prescribing or supplying drugs to the wrong people. According to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, opioids — including prescription pain relievers and heroin — killed more than 28,000 people in the US in 2014, more than in any other year on record.
Death rates are higher than those from road accidents or AIDS at its peak, and the crisis has prompted urgent calls for action.
The epidemic has been growing gradually since the 1990s, but really took a firm foothold in the public consciousness in April when rock musician Prince died of an overdose.
In the late 1990s and early 2000s, Hurwitz was one of the US’ pre-eminent specialists in pain and its treatment with pharmaceuticals. He came to the notice of the Virginia Board of Medicine, who suspended his license on several occasions, and eventually the police, when two patients died and it became clear his pills were reaching the black market. Yet Hurwitz was a polarizing figure who was as much lauded as condemned.
“I was bedridden — I was wearing diapers,” said Molly Shaw, one of the physician’s patients, who was suffering chronic pain due to a condition of the nervous system.
Tears streaming down her cheeks, Shaw described her pain as worse than childbirth, but said Hurwitz “really gave me my life back.”
“The thrust of the film is to say it is not as simple as ‘pharmaceutical companies and doctors created a nation of addicts,’” first-time director Eve Marson said.
The 34-year-old Marson said she was made aware of the US’ opioid problem by friends who were medics and every day saw people addicted to pills.
“If you are a doctor, here are these pills that are incredibly effective at treating pain and people come to you,” Marson said.
“One American in three suffers from chronic pain and you want to help them relieve this pain — that is why you became a doctor. And at the same time, how can you do this while being sensitive to not creating addiction?” she added.
Hurwitz has always maintained he acted in good faith, saying it was not his job to check up on who was using their medication responsibly and who was dealing.
However, he admitted to having possibly solved this dilemma “too easily, choosing to trust the patients” who sometimes abused the medication or sold their pills on the black market. Hurwitz said the crusade against him and other doctors had done nothing to stem the surge of opioid overdoses or the growth of the black market.
Hurwitz believes that while overdoses are given many column inches, suicides linked to untreated chronic severe pain are largely ignored. Other patients are refused painkillers and turn to the black market for drugs sometimes cut with substances like fentanyl, which is up to 50 times more potent than heroin, he said.
In an attempt to curb the epidemic, health authorities have issued guidelines to reduce the duration of prescriptions and try to reduce the number of pills in circulation. However, Marson believes better sharing of patient information is also key, as it would stop some addicts and dealers going “shopping from one doctor to the other” to amass stockpiles of pills.
With the midday sun blazing, an experimental orange and white F-16 fighter jet launched with a familiar roar that is a hallmark of US airpower, but the aerial combat that followed was unlike any other: This F-16 was controlled by artificial intelligence (AI), not a human pilot, and riding in the front seat was US Secretary of the Air Force Frank Kendall. AI marks one of the biggest advances in military aviation since the introduction of stealth in the early 1990s, and the US Air Force has aggressively leaned in. Even though the technology is not fully developed, the service is planning
INTERNATIONAL PROBE: Australian and US authorities were helping coordinate the investigation of the case, which follows the 2015 murder of Australian surfers in Mexico Three bodies were found in Mexico’s Baja California state, the FBI said on Friday, days after two Australians and an American went missing during a surfing trip in an area hit by cartel violence. Authorities used a pulley system to hoist what appeared to be lifeless bodies covered in mud from a shaft on a cliff high above the Pacific. “We confirm there were three individuals found deceased in Santo Tomas, Baja California,” a statement from the FBI’s office in San Diego, California, said without providing the identities of the victims. Australian brothers Jake and Callum Robinson and their American friend Jack Carter
CUSTOMS DUTIES: France’s cognac industry was closely watching the talks, fearing that an anti-dumping investigation opened by China is retaliation for trade tensions French President Emmanuel Macron yesterday hosted Chinese President Xi Jinping (習近平) at one of his beloved childhood haunts in the Pyrenees, seeking to press a message to Beijing not to support Russia’s war against Ukraine and to accept fairer trade. The first day of Xi’s state visit to France, his first to Europe since 2019, saw respectful, but sometimes robust exchanges between the two men during a succession of talks on Monday. Macron, joined initially by EU Commission President Ursula von der Leyen, urged Xi not to allow the export of any technology that could be used by Russia in its invasion
UNDER INVESTIGATION: Members of the local Muslim community had raised concerns with the police about the boy, who officials said might have been radicalized online A 16-year-old boy armed with a knife was shot dead by police after he stabbed a man in the Australian west coast city of Perth, officials said yesterday. The incident occurred in the parking lot of a hardware store in suburban Willetton on Saturday night. The teen attacked the man and then rushed at police officers before he was shot, Western Australian Premier Roger Cook told reporters. “There are indications he had been radicalized online,” Cook told a news conference, adding that it appeared he acted alone. A man in his 30s was found at the scene with a stab wound to his back.