An article on April 26, 2016 about 55 y/o Eugene J. Gosy, MD, a neurologist in Amherst, NY, by Mark Goshgarian entitled “Doctor Accused of Writing Prescriptions By the Thousands ‘Like a Drug Dealer’” shows what doctors are up against, as well as the method of attack by the Justice Department.  When people read an article with that heading, they will automatically consider the doctor guilty. In this manner, newspapers help put doctors in prison for money, just like the Justice Department does by charging them. The ‘like a drug dealer’ is how the Justice Department is mis-using the CSA (Controlled Substance Act) which stated that doctors were exempt from charges. But by calling the doctor a “drug dealer”, they get around that exemption.

The usual 2 years of paying Justice Department officers’ salaries for investigating another doctor has transpired since Dr. Gosy’s office was raided in 2014. To justify their existence, he has been indicted on 114 counts dealing with supposed fraud and illegal drug distribution since 2006.

“The defendant’s criminal conduct was orchestrated, pervasive, intentional and contrary to established medical practice,” said U.S. Western District Attorney William Hochul, “in other words, acting like a drug dealer without medical reason to prescribe these drugs,”

This is the hype that gets them past the exclusion paragraph of the CSA.

“It’s an important day for the victims and families who are currently suffering and battling through this opiod epidemic,” said John Flickinger, DEA Resident Agent-in-Charge.

That statement I agree with. Another doctor’s office closed means more people forced to the street for self-medication and death, either accidental or intentional suicide from unrelieved intractable pain.

Dr. Gosy faces up to 20 years in jail if convicted. It is really important for the pain patients of this entire country that he NOT be convicted. We must stop the gravy train that the Justice Department is running by attacking good doctors through lies and gross government conduct.

Another reporter, Phil Fairbanks of the Buffalo News, continued his negative reporting that he started in 2014 when reporting on the raid of Dr. Gosy’s office, making statements like:

“Eugene J. Gosy is one of the busiest pain-management doctors in the state”, and

“Federal prosecutors say he’s also one of the greediest”. 

In order to turn public opinion against Dr. Gosy, US Attorney William J. Hochul Jr is quoted as saying

“This case raises an important question – is it an even greater threat when someone violates his medical license and training?”

The fact that Dr. Gosy makes the sixth Western New York doctor to face prosecution over illegal prescriptions and puts one of the state’s most successful pain specialists in the spotlight created by the recent rash of opioid and heroin overdoses shows the real reason for these attacks on pain management doctors. The state has jumped on the gravy train of attacking doctors in order to confiscate their assets. That is substantiated by the fact that the billing investigation, led by the FBI’s Health Care Fraud Task Force and that state Office of Workers’ Compensation, Inspector General, already has led to a forfeiture action against Dr. Gosy and the seizure in September of two of his cars – a $126,000 Ferrari and a $103,000 Ford GT coupe.  Another little ploy to turn public opinion—advertise the value of his vehicles. What’s wrong with making money in this country? We don’t hold that against Sam Walmart, or Bill Gates, do we? And are they working with the knowledge that government agenda wants to put them in prison?

 At least Dr. Gozy’s lawyer, Mr. Jesse Baldwin, has made statements to the press on his behalf, which is more than most of us get, because most of us can’t afford a lawyer. “The evidence will clearly show that all scripts written for Dr. Gosy’s patients were for legitimate medical purposes. We’re confident that, after hearing all of the evidence, a jury will agree that Dr. Gosy did nothing wrong.” “Dr. Gosy has devoted his life to helping those who suffer from disabling pain,”

In September, 2014, Mr. Fairbanks and Susan Schulman, wrote about the government’s search of Dr. Gosy’s office. In this article, they do some quoting and paraphrasing of Dr. Gosy himself from 3 years prior pertaining to what methods drug addicts will do to get prescriptions refilled, such as reporting house fires and break-ins, even presenting the police reports to ‘prove’ these events occurred.  Dr. Gosy said he’d ‘heard it all when it comes to drug addicts seeking pain medication’.

In bringing up the 2011 comments, they mention that at that time Dr. Gosy was the No. 1 prescriber of controlled substances in New York.

In 2014 they label Gosy’s pain medication practice as ‘the busiest in the state’. Dr. Gosy’s office was being investigated per Michelle Spahn, head of the Drug Enforcement Administration in Buffalo and Maureen P. Dempsey of the FBI. The search involved the FBI, DEA, U.S. Health and Human Services’ Office of Inspector General and the New York State Department of Financial Services, which deals with banking and insurance issues.

This shows how many jobs get financed by these attacks on doctors. When my office was raided the first time in 2006, 30 people were involved. Then it takes 2 more years of paying their salaries before the final charges are placed.

Dr. Gozy was described by his lawyer, as a “a highly prominent and well-respected pain management physician, not only in Western New York but across the United States. Gosy and his staff have a long history of providing the highest-quality pain management care to their patients.”

Then this 2014 article goes into data from 2011, bringing out things like:

State officials confirmed Gosy wrote 10,280 prescriptions for 1,416 patients worth $1.33 million retail in 2011 to Medicare recipients—the most written for Medicare patients by any of the 637 neurologists in New York. Eighty-five percent of the 1,416 patients filled at least one prescription for a narcotic painkiller, the largest number for hydrocodone, and the second-most prescribed oxycontin, followed by morphine sulfate then fentanyl.

Now when you compute the numbers, that makes 7.25 prescriptions per patient, which isn’t even 1 perscription per month, since most of the medications named have to be written for only one month at a time. More prescriptions are written for diabetes or blood pressure medications! But putting numbers in a newspaper article makes it seem so much worse than it is.

Then the reporters have to really spread inaccurate government hype by saying:

All four drugs are opioids, effective painkillers that can also be highly addictive.

First, the opiate itself does not cause addiction. What causes addiction is the anxiety and resulting toxicity that the government is causing by shutting off patient’s access to pain relief.

Opioids, in recent years, have become popular street drugs. Throughout the United States, more people are now overdosing on opioids than on heroin and cocaine combined. Also, police throughout the country report that prescription opioid dependence has led to heroin addiction, since, on the streets, heroin is sometimes less expensive for addicts to obtain than opioid medication.

And the reasons for this?  Closing doctor’s offices that are treating chronic pain patients. This is forcing people to go to street drugs to treat themselves. And when they can’t find medications, they turn to heroin. But again, dependence on opiates, which is a natural physical reaction after being on a medication for a while, does not lead, in and of itself, to heroin addiction. But it is leading to deaths because people take whatever they can get, and the strengths of the pills they take vary. So they overdose accidentally. Also, let us not forget the intentional overdoses because people can’t face the pain. As people in chronic pain support groups point out, we wouldn’t treat our pets as badly as we are treating our fellow man.

Even though the reporters do say some redeeming facts when they say:

Gosy has previously described his center as a “model” practice that has helped thousands of patients from as far away as Jamestown and Rochester with chronic pain return to work and improve their quality of life,

they devalue that statement by perpetuating the news of lawsuits pertaining to patient deaths, even though in those cases the doctor was cleared, or the case was dropped.

Speaking for himself in an op-ed article written for The News two years ago, he said it’s almost impossible to overstate the extent of the chronic pain problem in the United States. That article can be seen on Dr. Gozy’s page.

Addendum:

August, 2023:  Dr. Gozy is no longer incarcerated. He is at a halfway house in Pittsburgh.  He could be communicating with us. Anyone in communication with him, please tell him to work on forgiveness and when he is ready, join us in the effort to restore humanity to the nation.

Addendum from the author:

I have failed in my mission to end these attacks on doctors and pain patients. Through John Bevere’s book The Bait of Satan, I have figured out why—my lack of forgiveness to those who attacked me. As in Mark 11: 24-26:

“Therefore I say to you, whatever things you ask when you pray, believe that you receive them, and you will have them. And whenever you stand praying, if you have anything against anyone, forgive him, that your Father in heaven may also forgive you your trespasses. But if you do not forgive, neither will your Father in heaven forgive your trespasses.”

And when you do not do the will of the Father, you are estranged from him and he will ignore you.  So we all must forgive the agents who attacked us in order for things to be made right through any of our works.

Jesus said

“Greater love has no one than this, than to lay down one’s life for his friends.”

But we cannot lay down our lives for God unless we know Him well enough to trust Him. We must have the assurance that He would never do anything to harm us. He always looks out for what He knows is in our best interest. As a nation, those of us suffering from these attacks must understand that we are serving as God’s messengers of love.  We must forgive those who persecute us and love them instead, following God’s will for us. Then and only then will we see fruits from our labor.

So I hope that everyone who has suffered from what happened to the doctor can trust the Lord, forgive those who have hurt you, and help bring this country back to the God-fearing country that our forefathers founded. Then, and only then, can you be a part of the effort to stop these attacks. I look forward to that day.