Since the verdict in the Hurwit trial on Friday, I’ve interviewed three of the twelve jurors, and they told pretty much the same story. They said that the jury considered Dr. William Hurwitz to be a doctor dedicated to treating pain who didn’t intentionally prescribe drugs to be resold or abused. They said he didn’t appear to benefit financially from his patients’ drug dealing and that he wasn’t what they considered a conventional drug trafficker.
So why did find him guilty of “knowingly and intentionally” distributing drugs “outside the bounds of medical practice” and engaging in drug trafficking “as conventionally understood”? After attending the trial and talking to the jurors, I can suggest two possible answers:
1. The jurors were confused by the law.
2. The law is a ass (to quote Mr. Bumble from “Oliver Twist”).
I can’t blame the jurors for being confused, because that’s the norm in trials of pain-management doctors. The standard prosecution strategy is to charge the doctor on so many counts and introduce so much evidence that the jurors assume something criminal must have happened. Their natural impulse, after listening to weeks of arguments, is to look for a compromise by digging into the mountain of medical minutiae – and getting in so deep that they lose sight of the big picture.
Tierney is sympathetic to the often desperate situation of those experiencing chronic pain, and their difficulties in getting help from most physicians. His reporting and analysis, and the comments by others, make for an important conversation on the topic.
One more in the long line of casualties in our self-defeating War on Drugs. I suspect historians will regard this "war" as even more catastrophic in its pernicious consequences for American society (not least in its devastating destruction of respect for law and legal institutions) than our failed efforts in Iraq.
No comments:
Post a Comment