Fisher, Millers mail for money

By Maline Hazle

July 26, 2000 Web posted at: 1:41 PM EDT (1741 GMT)

REDDING, California (Redding Record Searchlight) -- With their manslaughter and fraud trial less than three months away, Dr. Frank Fisher and the owners of a Redding pharmacy that filled his painkiller prescriptions are hoping the nation's doctors will come to their aid.

There's "much more" than Fisher's personal interests at stake in the Oct. 17 trial, Fisher says in a letter that will be mailed to thousands of doctors.

"The future course of regulatory intervention in pain medicine and the attendant suffering" of patients are at stake, the letters says. "The world is watching."

Fisher, 48, lived in Redding and practiced in Anderson when he was arrested, but now lives with his parents in El Cerrito. He said the two-pronged appeal is designed to teach people about the case and raise money for a defense fund for him and Stephen Miller, 50, and Madeline Miller, 46, owners of the Redding pharmacy said to have filled more Medi-Cal prescriptions for the pain-killing opiate OxyContin than any other pharmacy in the state.

But Fisher said everything he and the Millers did was within the law and that law enforcement simply "hasn't adjusted" to "very good" laws regarding opiate prescriptions.

Fisher and more than a dozen volunteers are working at the Millers' west Redding house, stuffing and hand-addressing thousands of letters that will be mailed to pain doctors across the country and every single doctor in Shasta County for whom Fisher has an address.

Each recipient is being asked to contribute $500 or more to the defense fund, a donation that not only will help win acquittals, but will "establish a measure of protection against this threat to all doctors of good conscience," Fisher says in the letters, each of which he is signing.

He said he hopes to have the first 2,000 letters in the mail by Monday.

Fisher is charged with three counts of voluntary manslaughter in the deaths of three patients he treated in 1998 and 1999. Stephen Miller is charged in two of the deaths. All three defendants face additional drug, fraud and conspiracy charges in the case, which was brought by state prosecutors.

When they were arrested Feb. 18, 1999, Fisher and the Millers were charged with five murders each, but all of those charges were dropped or reduced after a preliminary hearing last year.

After five months in Shasta County Jail, the trio's bail was dropped. Fisher, who had been held in lieu of $15 million bail, was allowed out after posting $50,000. The Millers, held in lieu of $1.5 million each, were released on their own recognizance.

The state has seized all his and the Millers' business records, including patients' charts, Fisher said. Their bank accounts are frozen and no one knows what the final legal tab will be.

But that's not the whole story, Fisher said Monday.

His letter says his case is "one example of what has become an alarming trend "the domineering assault on legitimate medical practice by drug police, who maintain a purposeful ignorance of current enlightened standards in CIP (chronic intractable pain) treatment."

The Harvard-educated pain specialist acknowledges that there is a "lively and productive debate" among doctors over the use of opiates to treat pain, but insists that it should be up to the medical profession to evaluate and set prescription standards, not law enforcement.

A four-page insert with Fisher's letter accuses state lawyers of having "squandered millions of dollars" in tax money on the prosecutions and refers readers to Fisher's website, www.drfisher.org.

Citing testimony from the preliminary hearing, the website contends that drug agents "threatened" a witness that if his wife failed to cooperate in the investigation, a pending criminal matter "could go bad for her."

In addition, the website quotes testimony of one of the drug agents showing that they knew that one of Fisher's alleged victims was not a patient, but died after taking medication stolen from one of Fisher's patients.

Other evidence was eliminated from the trial because agents who questioned the Millers detained and questioned them without advising them of their rights to have an attorney present, the website says.

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