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Thursday, July 08, 2004
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SPOTLIGHT ON: ONE OF UD’s COLLEAGUES
Regular readers of UD know that there used to be a little tag line up there [^], identifying UD’s university as “hot.” UD continues to believe that this designation (questioned by more than one reader) is justifiable, and when GW inspires national and international headlines, as it often does, she likes to cite such headlines as evidence of the university’s importance. GW’s medical school professors, for instance, have traditionally tended to and certified the health of America’s highest-ranking government officials, and this brings the university a good deal of publicity. For five years, one of these faculty members demonstrated that you can be the Vice-President’s physician and a drug addict at the same time, a new high in multi-tasking. “Was he taking just enough to take the edge off?” asks GW’s provost, also one of this professor’s patients. The provost never suspected that, as the New Zealand News put it in a headline, his doctor had “Sniffed Away $70,000 in Nasal Spray.” For various complicated and well-meaning reasons, this professor was allowed to continue practicing, and prescribing narcotics to himself, even as various disciplinary bodies were aware that he was under treatment for addiction. Although many newspapers (and the Vice President’s spokesman) have used words like “struggle” and “ordeal” to describe this faculty member’s experience of addiction and treatment, there’s nothing in the record to indicate that his five years of therapy - now officially declared a failure - involved any effort on his part to get better. I don‘t want to sound like an ideologue, but when highly educated people are junkies and do the sorts of things this guy did -- like write prescriptions for himself using the names and DEA numbers of various doctor friends -- they‘re typically described as struggling valiantly with a complex disability. Junkies drawn from the lower orders who similarly lie and steal are dismissed as garden-variety scum. As the provost’s comment suggests, this man seems to have maintained himself and his hot career rather nicely on a diet of drugs -- one of many high-functioning white-collar addicts in America. For the last two years, he's been listed by Washingtonian Magazine as one of the best doctors in the region. "The vice president's health is monitored closely by a team of physicians from George Washington University Medical Center and the White House," Cheney’s spokesperson recently said. Yes, and his primary physician among that lot “bought 76 bottles of the synthetic narcotic nasal spray Stadol during a four-month period in 2000. During a 2 1/2-year period ending in December 2001, the doctor spent at least $46,238 on Internet purchases of Stadol, Xanax, Tylenol with codeine and Ambien,” reports CNN. The implication in the media is that the vice-president isn’t really fit to govern, but has only been certified as physically ok by an incompetent (and easily blackmailed?) doctor. Which is silly. There’s no evidence of impaired skills on the part of this doctor. Like Rush Limbaugh, he just likes to take lots of drugs. |