Dr. Katherine Hoover, accused of fueling West Virginia's opioid crisis, still thinks she didn't do anything wrong
S E E D E D C O N T E N T
From December 2002 to January 2010, more than 335,130 prescriptions for painkillers were issued under the name of Dr. Katherine Hoover at the West Virginia clinic where she worked — a rate of about 130 per day, assuming she worked seven days a week.
Another doctor who worked with her in the Mountain Medical Care Center, in tiny Williamson, West Virginia, was charged with selling prescriptions to people he never examined, and the office manager was arrested as well. The clinic was closed. But Hoover was not prosecuted and headed to the Bahamas while her colleagues faced prison.
In her first extended interviews since then, Hoover — whose name was invoked as a symbol of the deadly opioid crisis at a recent congressional hearing — told NBC News there is a very simple reason why the government did not throw the book at her.
“I was never charged or ever investigated because I didn’t commit any crimes,” Hoover said by telephone. “I prescribed narcotics to people in pain. I did everything I could to help people have a better life, which I told the FBI.”
“Every prescription I wrote was justified for the person who had gotten it,” she added.
Hoover, 68, wrote more opioid prescriptions than any other doctor in West Virginia from 2002 to 2010, government investigators said in court documents. As of 2016, West Virginia has the nation’s highest rate of fatal drug overdoses due to opioids.
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This is why I'm not supportive of the idea of legalizing unlimited access to narcotics. In some areas, such access has already more or less been in existence, due to the prescribing practices of some physicians. And this is where it got us.
If they can’t get it from people like her they turn to the street where they up up dying from fentanyl.
If they're going to end up dead either way, possibly taking others with them (there have been several instances of people driving with their kids in the car while they were incapacitated by opioids), should we be enabling them?
And if they're becoming addicted to prescription drugs initially, isn't that something we should be addressing, too? If they never get hooked, they won't turn to street drugs.