Jurors Convict Physician in OxyContin Deaths

The potent mix of pills including the controversial drug OxyContin became known as “Graves’ cocktails.” The parking lot at the doctor’s office was jammed by patients awaiting their turn for a prescription.

“You’ve got to realize something’s wrong when outside your office, people are having tailgate parties,” Assistant State Atty. Russell Edgar said.

On Tuesday, a jury in the Florida Panhandle town of Milton agreed, finding Dr. James Graves guilty of manslaughter in the deaths of four of his patients from overdoses. The 55-year-old’s conviction was believed to be the first for a physician in deaths linked to abuse of OxyContin, a synthetic opiate.

Graves, who had been Florida’s No. 1 prescriber of the powerful painkiller, was also convicted of racketeering and unlawful delivery of a controlled substance. He now faces up to 30 years in prison.

Graves had maintained under oath that he had no idea his patients were abusing drugs and that no one would have died if his patients had taken their medication as he prescribed.

“OxyContin is a good drug if taken properly,” H.E. Ellis Jr., the doctor’s defense attorney, said. “Pharmacy companies don’t spend billions of dollars developing drugs if they are going to kill people.”

But the prosecution claimed Graves was desperate for money after he lost jobs in the Navy, a Pensacola clinic and a state prison. When word got around that the physician allegedly was indiscriminately prescribing drugs, the patients--and money--began rolling in. Among addicts, “word spread that he was the go-to doctor,” Edgar told the jury in his summation Monday. “He is no different than a drug dealer.”

The prosecutor estimated that Graves had been grossing $500,000 a year from patients he saw at his pain management offices in his hometown of Pace, Fla., north of Pensacola, and Brewton, Ala.

According to drug abuse experts, addicts can obtain a heroin-like high by chewing OxyContin pills or crushing them to make a solution for intravenous injection.

Suspicious of Graves’ motives, more than 20 area pharmacists testified that they had stopped filling prescriptions for what they dubbed “Graves’ cocktails”--a mix of OxyContin, painkillers, tranquilizers and muscle relaxants.

In his three days on the witness stand, Graves said that he was bound to take his patients at their word when they said they were suffering and needed drugs to alleviate the pain. “‘It is a risk you have to accept when treating these patients,” the doctor said. “They are deserving of treatment of their pain.”

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Associated Press contributed to this report.