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At a recent congressional hearing, Joseph Rannazzisi, an official in the Drug Enforcement Administration's Office of Diversion Control, proclaimed his agency's "firm commitment to the balanced policy of promoting pain relief and preventing the abuse of pain medications." The DEA, he said, wants to "help physicians meet the challenge of ensuring that people who medically need drugs get them, and that those who are diverting them don't."This "balanced policy" is a "challenge" because pain cannot be verified objectively. The only sure way of "preventing the abuse of pain medications" is to stop treating patients with them, which would leave millions...

On April 14, 2005, the day Dr. William E. Hurwitz was sentenced to 25 years in prison, Karen Tandy called a news conference to celebrate the sentence and reassure other doctors. Ms. Tandy, head of the Drug Enforcement Administration, held up a plastic bag containing 1,600 opioid pills. “Dr. Hurwitz prescribed 1,600 pills to one person to take in a single day,” she announced. This bag showed that he was “no different from a cocaine or heroin dealer peddling poison on the street corner,” she said, and made it “immediately apparent” that he was not a legitimate doctor. “To the...

ALEXANDRIA, Va. – After deliberating for seven days in federal court here, a jury late this afternoon found Dr. William Hurwitz guilty on 16 counts of drug trafficking. Dr. Hurwitz, whose legal battles over his opioid prescriptions made him a hero to some chronic-pain patients, was not convicted of the other 29 counts against him. The bad news for Dr. Hurwitz (and his many supporters who have been posting here) is that he remains in prison and will be sentenced on July 13 for writing prescriptions of OxyContin and other opioids to drug dealers and addicts. But his prospects are...

EDITORIAL OBSERVER Federal prosecutors in Virginia want Dr. William Hurwitz, recently convicted on 50 counts of distributing narcotics, to go to prison for life without parole when he is sentenced in mid-April. For the 50 million or so Americans who suffer from chronic pain, the fate of Dr. Hurwitz should be of some interest. He is a prominent doctor committed to aggressive treatment of pain. His behavior in some cases was inexcusable. Patients for whom he freely provided large prescriptions should, at the very minimum, have been given more close supervision. But malpractice should be cause for loss of license....

I have to admit I'm impressed by the achievement of the federal prosecutors who call McLean, Va., pain doctor William Hurwitz "a major and deadly drug dealer." Though the evidence at his trial made it clear Dr. Hurwitz was not a drug trafficker, they still managed to get him convicted. The prosecutors did not dispute Dr. Hurwitz had helped hundreds of patients recover their lives by prescribing the high doses of opioids they needed to control their chronic pain. Instead they pointed to the small minority of his patients -- 5 to 10 percent, by his attorneys' estimate -- who...

Va. Man Faces Possible Life Term on Trafficking Counts A federal jury convicted a prominent former pain doctor on drug trafficking charges yesterday, siding with prosecutors in an increasingly contentious nationwide dispute over whether prescribing large doses of powerful narcotics is criminal behavior or good medicine. Jurors found William E. Hurwitz guilty of running a drug conspiracy out of his McLean office, convicting him on 50 counts -- including trafficking that caused the death of one patient and seriously injured two others. They acquitted him of nine other counts and deadlocked on the final three in the 62-count indictment. U.S....

Prosecuting doctors for their patients' misuse of narcotics hurts people in pain Prosecutors say McLean, Virginia, physician William Hurwitz, who is on trial at the federal courthouse in Alexandria, knowingly supplied OxyContin and other narcotic painkillers to patients who sold them on the black market. "A self-proclaimed healer, he crossed the line to dealer," Assistant U.S. Attorney Mark Lytle declared in his opening statement. "He thought he could hide behind the pain he treated." When Hurwitz was indicted last fall, U.S. Attorney Paul McNulty called him a "major and deadly drug dealer." Charged with 62 counts related to what prosecutors...