Dopesick - Beth Macy Page 0,30

was not the “kind of guy you raised hell with in college.” It occurred then to him that the country doctor was the perfect conduit for helping him identify plaintiffs to sue Purdue. In fact it was Van Zee who eventually connected Yeary to McCauley, a patient Van Zee was by then treating for OxyContin addiction.

But like most of the civil plaintiffs suing Purdue, Fayne McCauley was an imperfect client, because he admitted under oath that he had taken multiple drugs, gradually supplementing his original OxyContin prescriptions with OxyContin he’d bought on the streets. When his original doctor, Richard C. Norton, tried to wean him from the drug, cutting him back from 40 to 20 milligrams, it had made McCauley extremely nervous, crippling him with diarrhea, sweats, and a skin-crawling feeling he called gooseflesh. McCauley bought the black-market OxyContin, he told an opposing lawyer from Purdue in a series of depositions, for the same reason a century’s worth of heroin addicts had kept returning to their dealers for more dope: to stave off dopesickness.

It didn’t matter that the septuagenarian hadn’t been stealing from his granddaughter before OxyContin came along, or cashing out his relatives’ life-insurance policies, or borrowing guns for protection from his new pill-peddling associates. It didn’t matter that he’d been treated with lower-strength opioids after losing two fingers to a 1980 coal-mining accident but did not develop a $300-a-day drug habit until 1999, shortly after his first bottle of OxyContin.

Nor did it matter that people like Van Zee had urged Dr. Norton not to fall for the Purdue reps’ spiel about “the great epidemic of untreated severe pain.” Van Zee had seen Norton’s clinic in nearby Duffield, with its parking lot full of out-of-state cars, and confronted him about it at a hospital meeting. (“I said, ‘You know, Rich, people are injecting this.’ And he was astounded,” Van Zee recalled.)

In 2000, Norton was sentenced to five years in federal prison, not for overprescribing OxyContin but for his role in an unrelated hospital corruption scheme. According to sales-rep notes subpoenaed in the McCauley case, federal prosecutors were also investigating Norton for operating a pill mill but opted to front-burner the wider and more urgent corruption case.

Stallard, the Big Stone Gap drug detective, remembered an informant unpacking the life of a Norton patient: “He told us, ‘Dr. Norton wrote prescriptions for Lortab, forty-milligram OxyContins, and eighty-milligram Oxys all in the same visit.’” When Stallard subpoenaed the physician’s records, he saw Norton had prescribed thousands of OxyContin pills in just thirty days.

Stallard turned the information over to Brownlee’s assistant prosecutors, who said physician cases were difficult to prove, since there was always another paid physician expert willing to testify that such prescription dosages were necessary. Nonetheless, the prosecutors brought in DEA agents to help target the most egregious prescribers, and local detectives started feeding them information, Stallard said.

“We sent all kinds of information in to the feds but we never got anything back out of them. They told us nothing,” he added, of Brownlee and his assistant prosecutors. “We started calling them the Shadow Company.”

The federal investigation actually began when the Shadow Company realized Norton was simply following his Purdue rep’s guidelines to a T, Stallard said.

But none of that counted in the civil cases against Purdue, wherein plaintiffs had to prove that a specific injury was directly tied to company wrongdoing with such specificity that a reasonable jury could assign the wrongdoing a dollar amount. Federal judge James P. Jones dismissed the McCauley case on the grounds that a jury would not have been able to divine whether OxyContin alone had caused the coal miner’s suffering.

Though other judges across the country simply dismissed the OxyContin lawsuits, Jones took the unusual step of inserting a personal opinion into his ruling: “Does the relief afforded by high-dosage opioids to those with severe, life-altering pain outweigh the risks of harm from addiction?” he wrote. McCauley’s case did not answer that question, he said.

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A God-fearing Baptist, Fayne McCauley had loved country music and the Atlanta Braves. Everyone in the town of Jonesville knew him because he had refereed home basketball games at Lee High School for many years. His family had sent him to rehab seven times, before and after the case. “Every time he’d come back and lie to us and say he’s not taking the pills anymore when we knew he was,” his daughter, Lisa Green, told me. McCauley ended up selling family heirlooms at a flea market. He stole credit cards