DeWeese defends record

“Pathetic.”

That’s how embattled physician Paul DeWeese characterized an FBI affidavit filed in federal court alleging a variety of abuses in his Lansing-based pain management and drug addiction medical practice.

DeWeese, a former state representative from Ingham County whose license was suspended last month pending the outcome of state and federal probes, broke his silence on the “City Pulse Newsmakers” TV show Saturday. The show is available at www.lansingcitypulse.com.

“I felt the way this was going — especially the high-profile nature of the media — I just felt like it wasn’t wise to just let the allegations be floating out there,” he said.

That, he said, outweighed the risk of surrendering Fifth Amendment rights against self-incrimination — even though he said he expects he will probably be indicted.

DeWeese said in his defense that the FBI ignored that he discharged 240 patients he knew or suspected were abusing his prescriptions.

“That has never been brought up by the FBI because it is against their narrative,” he said. “The narrative is that I am just dishing out drugs like crazy, giving them to drug dealers and I don’t care about anything.

“The fact that I would have discharged 240 patients — many of them who were caught selling their prescriptions, and that’s why we discharged them — is kind of against the whole grain” of the FBI’s case, he said.

He blames his legal problems on discharged patients who turned “vindictive.”

“About 40 of those 240 were very angry and came back at us and said things like ‘I’m bringing a shotgun and I’m blowing your staff away,´ ‘I’m going to calling the FBI, I’m going to lie about you,’ ‘I’m going to bring you down,’ ‘I’m going to destroy you,’ ‘I’m going to get your license taken away.’”

Jacob Burns, one of DeWeese’s pain patients, supported him. He told the story of a woman DeWeese discharged after she failed a drug screening.

“She was screaming at the top of her lungs,” Burns recalled.He said she called the police and threatened to call the FBI.

Said DeWeese: “Not once in the whole 40-page-plus document did the FBI ever indicate that this person was discharged from our practice and threatened us with this kind of information, because it was against their narrative.”

He took exception to the FBI’s implied characterization that he exploited patients he took into his home by giving them drugs in exchange for favors, sexual and otherwise.

DeWeese said he acted out of his Catholic faith in offering assistance to people who needed help.

“There was no quid pro quo,” he said.

He said the patients would then offer to run errands or make meals or clean the common areas.

“We were living in community,” he said.

One of them was a prostitute trying to get away from her pimp, who was paying her in heroin. After she broke down in his office when she sought treatment, he offered shelter because she had nowhere else to turn, he said.

One couple he invited into his home had been living on the “under the Kalamazoo Street bridge” for over a year, he said.

He also defended his July 4, 2014, trip to Escanaba in the Upper Peninsula to visit patients and write prescriptions. He said they could not afford the seven-hour trip to Lansing.

Morever, understanding where and how a patient lives provides many details a physician can use in caring for that patient, he contended. He said he also educated family members about how they could help their kin.

He rejected the allegations by the FBI he drove up there just to write prescriptions. He also defended meeting some of them in such places as a McDonald’s between the U.P. and Lansing. He did so as a matter of convenience and said he asked them the same questions he would have in a medical office, entering their answers on his laptop.

DeWeese, 60, said he has been living on retirement savings since his license was suspended. His legal bills in July alone were $25,000, he said.

DeWeese served four years in the Legislature representing rural Ingham County from 1999 to 2003. He was a Republican.

He has been on missions providing medical treatment with Mother Teresa’s Missionaries of Charity. He has traveled to Africa three times for the Nyaka AIDS Orphan Project. He’s also been an emergency room physician.

DeWeese said his Catholic faith has played a large role in the way he practices medicine.

“It’s all about the notion that God is a God of redemption,” DeWeese said, “that God is a God that especially cares about the disempowered, the impoverished, the poor, the people that aren’t protected.”

DeWeese sees this example again and again in the traditional Biblical stories such as the Good Samaritan, and even in the story of the Jewish exodus from slavery in Egypt.

That philosophy led DeWeese to focus his medical work on addicts and chronic pain sufferers, he said. He said in the interview that that group of people is “looked down upon” by traditional medicine.

For DeWeese, that meant working with people with chronic pain and addiction issues, because they are “stigmatized” by traditional medical establishments. They are also, he said, a difficult community to work with.

“It takes a long time; it takes a lot of effort to get to know this patient population,” he said of the addicted community. He noted that many in that community have learned to survive by lying, cheating and stealing — something most traditional medical practices are unprepared to confront and handle.

But that may be changing. Earlier this month the Michigan Health and Hospital Association announced it had adopted new programming to reduce the prescription of opioid pain medications and better regulate pain management for persons with chronic pain.

DeWeese said part of the reason the medical community is turning its back on the needs of chronic pain sufferers and the addicted community is the crackdown on physicians.

“They’re scared,” he said of physicians. “They’re scared of being raided by 25 armed federal agents.”

As a result of that fear, physicians are not treating pain or addiction, and those impacted have to turn to the street. And on the street, prescription drugs sell for as much as a dollar a milligram. Heroin is much cheaper.

“When you have those people kind of flooding the street and the market because they can’t get their legitimate pain needs met, or they can’t get their addiction needs met, you drive up demand for heroin,” De- Weese said.

And local statistics show there is a serious crisis brewing in Lansing. Since January, 47 heroin overdoses have been recorded by Lansing Police. Seven have been fatal, more than the previous two years combined.

Ultimately, he said it is about sharing with others.

“We are to be about suffering with people,” he said. “The idea is to be aware of people that are in need and actually treat them as if they are God.”