Doctors at a Veterans Affairs hospital in Wisconsin dope up veterans with unusual amounts of painkillers, turning them into “zombies” to keep them sedated and easily managed, according to patients and onetime staff, a new investigation found.
The Center for Investigative Reporting wrote Thursday that doctors at the VA hospital in Tomah, Wis., wrote 25,000 prescriptions for opiates in 2012, up from about 2,000 11 years prior.
At least one patient has died of the drugs while in VA care. Many of the patients were there to work through psychological trauma, but instead, the VA deadened them emotionally, one former VA psychiatrist said.
“We were supposed to be doing hard work, getting these veterans to fight through their anxiety and fear,” Jennifer Brooks said. “But their eyes would be dilated, their sentences would be blurry. Sometimes they’d be on so many medications that they’d fall asleep.”
The hospital is run by David Houlihan, a psychiatrist who was previously disciplined by the Iowa Board of Medicine “for being ‘inappropriately engaged in a social relationship with a patient,’ hiring a current or former patient and bringing a patient’s medicine home with him,” according to CIR.
VA’s inspector general has received numerous complaints about Houlihan’s prescription patterns, and wrote a report on it in March. But the VA IG never made the report public or shared the report with Congress.
The IG found that while Houlihan hasn’t faced sanctions, the whistleblowers who raised concerns were forced out.
One former VA pharmacist who said Houlihan gladly refilled subscriptions for veterans who implausibly claimed they had lost their opiates five times, now works at Wal-Mart.
No senior agency official was willing to comment on the issue to CIR.
