Doctor Faces Charges of Making Patients ‘Junkies’

A Newhall physician has been arrested on charges that she got her patients addicted to painkillers and wrote prescriptions that enabled one patient to buy up to 900 codeine pills in one month, authorities said Wednesday.

Dr. Sandra Soho, who was Dr. Stanley Soho until a 1986 sex-change operation, was arrested Tuesday and charged with 10 felony counts of illegally furnishing restricted substances--prescription painkillers--to patients who subsequently became addicted.

She had purchased the practice of Dr. Milos Klvana, a home-birthing advocate who was arrested in 1986 on charges that he killed eight infants and a fetus.

Soho could not be reached for comment Wednesday. A receptionist in her office said the doctor had planned for weeks to be out of the office Wednesday for surgery.

Deputy Dist. Atty. Bradford E. Stone said investigators found no evidence that Soho received kickbacks from pharmacies for the prescriptions, but said she profited from the $25 consultation fee she charged patients for each visit.

“She was turning these people into prescription-drug junkies by prescribing them incredible numbers of pills,” Stone said.

Most of her patients came to Soho’s office with legitimate medical problems but became addicts after following her advice, Stone said. She conducted only a minimal exam before writing prescriptions, he said.

He said there was no evidence that patients were reselling the drugs for their own profit and said some are now experiencing withdrawal symptoms.

Since 1986, Soho has practiced in the Newhall offices of Klvana, the obstetrician who was sentenced in February to 53-years-to-life in prison for nine counts of second-degree murder.

Soho, a 1967 graduate of the University of Oregon Health Sciences School of Medicine, was hired by Klvana’s wife to keep her husband’s medical practice alive after his arrest in October, 1986.

Vicky Boone, an analyst for the Medical Board of California, said Soho was prohibited from practicing medicine from 1981 until 1984 after the physician failed repeated oral examinations.

The Medical Board in 1981 required that Soho take the exam after investigators found that the doctor had abandoned patients in hospitals and nursing homes and had falsified medical records and death certificates, Boone said. Medical regulators at the time had found Soho’s professional conduct “grossly incompetent . . . dishonest and corrupt,” according to authorities.

In May, 1984, Soho passed the exam and was placed on five-year probation, Boone said.

Jerry Sanders, regional director of the state medical board, said Soho’s physician’s license could be revoked if she is convicted of the charges pending against her.

But Sanders said Soho, who is free on $50,000 bail, may continue to practice medicine until the board concludes its administrative proceedings, unless state officials decide to seek a court order restraining her from seeing patients.

“The board doesn’t have authority for interim suspension of a license. We would have to go to a magistrate and request a temporary restraining order, and I don’t know if we are going to do that or not,” Sanders said.