Readers React: Is it fair to hold a doctor responsible for her patients’ overdoses?

To the editor: The conviction for Rowland Heights physician Hsiu-Ying “Lisa” Tseng strikes me as overly harsh and perhaps even stretches the definition of second-degree murder. (“Doctor convicted of murder for patients’ drug overdoses gets 30 years to life in prison,” Feb. 5)

It appears that Tseng over-prescribed pain killers for her patients based on their demand for them, perhaps because of their addiction — but was she expected to know that? And aren’t the patients themselves at least partly responsible for their addictions?

As the article states, the overprescription of addictive medications has become a national concern because of the quadrupling of overdose deaths from 1999 to 2011. But I may have been a holdout if I were on the jury.

California law defines second-degree murder in part as “a killing caused by dangerous conduct and the offender’s obvious lack of concern for human life.” It does seem Tseng should have been more concerned about the number of refills demanded by her patients, but is this in itself “dangerous conduct”? And did she act as if she had a “lack of concern” for her patients’ lives?

Malpractice, maybe, but murder?

Fred Dean, Los Angeles

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To the editor: I applaud both The Times’ reports and the Los Angeles County district attorney’s office for the dedication and investigation it took to charge and bring to trial Dr. Tseng.

I am a retired employee of the district attorney’s office. I am also the former wife of a man who was found dead of prescription overdose.

I found documents that showed a Los Angeles doctor was authorizing many local pharmacies to mail the same prescription to his home back east and then to Northern California. I mailed the findings of my personal investigation to the California Medical Board and the L.A. County district attorney back in 1995. The view then was that it was the victim’s fault.

This trial is a vindication of what many of us survivors have long known: It was the fault of the doctors who turned their patients into addicts.

Wendy A. Robinson, Saugus

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To the editor: Why does a doctor go to jail for life because some careless or disturbed addicts overdose on some of her prescriptions, while gun dealers sell lethal weapons with impunity to mass killers over and over and over again?

Leo Buxbaum, MD, Whittier

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