CRAWLING IN THEIR SHOES –
August 9, 2023 – The state police and the DEA had recently raided my office. I had been charged, booked, fingerprinted, and the medical board had stripped away my hard-won license to practice medicine. The last time I sat at this table, I was one of the millions of Americans ensnared in an opioid addiction.
In 2015, I looked back on eight years of sobriety and into the faces of the physicians who inhabited the hell I escaped. I had been hired as an associate director for the Massachusetts Physician Health Service to help doctors who had, like me, seen their lives decimated by addiction. The table divides the addicted from the recovered, and looking across it, I saw my earlier self in these doctors’ eyes, dulled by hopelessness, cravings and despair.
Doctors with addictions are sometimes given a second chance to practice medicine if they manage to jump through the hoops demanded by the medical boards. I was drug-tested from one to three times a week for five years, which adds up to 20 gallons of urine. After more than three years, I was allowed to practice medicine again. Currently, I have been in recovery from my opioid addiction for 15 years.
