The Myrtle Beach OxyContin trial: The price for a pill

This story was originally published March 2, 2003.

Sleep is slow to come for the doctor’s mother and troubled when it arrives. Alone in her house, in the dark, she wonders how the boy she raised became a man she doesn’t recognize.

“I wake up at night, and it’s the first thing I think about,” Dot Woodward says, “and sometimes it takes me two hours to go back to sleep.”

Woodward last saw her son in August, and when she did visit, they were separated by glass and wood, like a theater ticket-taker and a moviegoer. That’s how they talked, too, by microphone, like she was his customer. The guards at the jail wouldn’t let her hug him. Not even a touch.

Her husband is dead. Her oldest son is dead. Michael is the only family left to her, and now he’s locked up for illegally prescribing narcotics to junkies and laundering his millions in ill-gotten gain.

“I have no idea what’s going on,” Dot Woodward says. “He never has explained. You wouldn’t believe what I have been through last summer and this winter.”

The doctor’s mother has been protected from the news about him because she lives in northwestern Georgia in the same town where she and husband, Mack, raised their sons.

But on the Grand Strand, reports about Michael Woodward have been in the newspapers and on TV broadcasts. He has become well known as the pain doctor who dispensed thousands of doses of OxyContin from his clinic, Comprehensive Care and Pain Management Center, in Myrtle Beach and then pleaded guilty and testified against his former partners in the hope of lighter punishment. A New York Times article about OxyContin focused on Woodward and his clinic.

He wrote so many prescriptions out of his pain management clinic that it caught the attention of federal agents and the sales department of Purdue Pharma, the Connecticut pharmaceutical company that manufactures OxyContin. For a while, Myrtle Beach was the national capital for OxyContin, known among dealers and users as “hillbilly heroin.”

Police describe Woodward as a drug dealer and a cheat, whose fellow doctors said they feared for their safety if they crossed him. But this is not the person Dot Woodward raised.

She doesn’t deny her son’s guilt. She simply can’t comprehend his crime. To her, he was the son who pestered his father about precision on tax returns.

“He was a fanatic over, ‘Do everything right. Don’t do anything wrong,’” she says. “I have accepted it, but I cannot figure out why or how he got into this mess. He was never a troublemaker. To my knowledge, he never even had a speeding ticket.”

Whatever his troubles, Woodward was able to keep them from his 72-year-old mother. When he moved to Florida, after federal agents closed his clinic in June 2001, he told his mother he was escaping the pressures of his profession. “I kept saying, ‘When are you going back in practice or become CEO of a hospital?’” she says.

His answer was always that he wanted to spend more time with his three children: a son, 10, and daughters, 9 and 7. Dot Woodward learned of the indictment in June through a telephone call from Jill Woodward, her daughter-in-law. “She called me the day he was arrested. I broke down, and I cried for about a week.”

Michael Woodward was studious, the valedictorian of the class of 1975 at LaFayette High School. He played baritone in the high-school band. After high school, he and his friends formed Valholla, a band that played in local clubs.

He announced in high school that he wanted to be a doctor. Mack and Dot Woodward, who owned a construction company, were generous with their sons, she says. Upon Michael’s high-school graduation, they bought him a Chevy sports car; in college they bought him another new Chevy. They bought him a Mercury Cougar for medical school.

By the time the medical school at the Mercer University admitted him, Woodward already had earned his Master of Business Administration and a law degree from the University of Georgia at Athens.

“He tried seven or eight years before he was accepted,” his mother says.

Woodward finished medical school in 1989, specializing in neurology. Through Yale University’s School of Medicine, he served his internship and residency at hospitals in Connecticut, according to his application to practice medicine in South Carolina.

Although he was licensed in Georgia, South Carolina is the only state where he has practiced medicine. He applied for his license May 16, 1993. One section of the application requires fingerprints and a sample of handwriting; the applicant is asked to describe, in his handwriting, why he wants to be a doctor in South Carolina.

Woodward’s reply, in part, said: “I … plan to offer the best care possible to the people of the community.”

His mother never has seen a change in his personality, nothing that would have predicted or could explain his criminal activity, she says, but his older brother’s sudden death of pancreatitis at age 26 took a toll.

Whatever he became, she says, his motives were pure. “I don’t really think it was altogether the money,” she says. “It was just in his heart that he wanted to be a doctor and help people.”

In the end, Woodward helped himself to millions of dollars, handed out lots of narcotics and made OxyContin affordable for the recreational user.

When the DEA shut the clinic down in June 2001, it wasn’t the first time he had been in trouble. Within four years of his arrival in Myrtle Beach, the state Board of Medical Examiners revoked Woodward’s license because of allegations he had an improper relationship with a woman patient and for overprescribing narcotics.

A judge reversed the revocation. But a year later, in November 1998, the board again yanked his license, only to have a judge order another hearing. In November 2001, Woodward gave up his license and promised he would never again apply to practice medicine in South Carolina; in return, the board dropped the charge, which was lodged in 1996.

When the board first revoked his license in 1997, the federal indictment against him alleges, Woodward already was illegally prescribing drugs and cheating the Medicare system out of thousands of dollars.

William E. Day II, the assistant U.S. attorney who prosecuted the OxyContin case in Florence, said witnesses had painted Woodward as an intimidating figure. The cache of 21 guns, including at least five AK-47 military-style weapons, and the 17,000 rounds of ammunition investigators confiscated from Woodward’s office, enhanced the perception that he might be dangerous. In rebuffing Woodward’s lawyers’ request to reduce his $250,000 bond, Judge Thomas Rogers III said: “The mere existence of these guns does give me concern.”

In his agreement to plead guilty, Woodward admitted he had used or intended to use the weapons in his criminal enterprise.

Still, the Woodward he met, Day says, was not threatening. “The side I saw of him was easy to get along with, very cooperative. He’s extremely intelligent … very pleasant. He wasn’t the least bit hostile. A lot of people had been afraid of him and his temper, but I didn’t see that.”

At least $6 million went through the clinic, Day says, and little of it was legitimate.

Woodward testified at the trial of his former employees that, in the beginning, his practice was on the up-and-up. However, Woodward later testified the clinic became a “pill mill.”

Agents arrested Woodward in Florida in June, and he’s been in jail since. He pleaded guilty to three reduced charges in January with a maximum penalty of 20 years for each. But the judge won’t sentence Woodward until the federal government completes all its investigations. “We’re still talking to him,” Day says.

Doreen Beal, who became Woodward’s 88th patient after he opened here, went to the clinic to seek relief from migraine headaches. For about five years, he prescribed painkillers less potent than OxyContin. But for the last two years of his practice, he prescribed three 80-milligram-tablets of OxyContin per day, as well as Soma and Valium.

He was always a gentleman, Beal says, and was more gentle with spinal taps than any doctor she has seen. “We joked with him all the time,” she says. “I used to tell him he was the Pillsbury Doughboy.”

She went to his clinic until investigators closed it.

To most people, a list that now includes his mother, Woodward is an ambiguity. He was flirty, according to waitresses at the cafe two doors down from his clinic, but otherwise they knew little about him.

His wife, Jill, who lives in Florida with their three children, declined a request for an interview.

“It’s not over yet,” she says. “If I said anything to hurt him, I could never forgive myself.”

Bill Watkins, his lawyer in Columbia, did not respond to several messages left by The Sun News. Attempts to interview Woodward failed. The lawyer representing several clients in a lawsuit against Woodward did not return telephone calls. The principal at his high school in LaFayette, Ga., declined to even confirm Woodward had attended there or that he was the 1975 class valedictorian.

His mother, though, talked freely, as if in speaking she could reach comprehension. Heartache and bewilderment was evident in her voice. In the decade Woodward lived on the Grand Strand, she only visited him twice.

“We were an average American family,” Dot Woodward says. “We got along real well.”

This Christmas was her worst - even worse, she says, than the first one after her other son died.

“It was like a nightmare. I did no decorations. Nothing. I was here all alone. It was just another day to me.”

So she lies awake in her bed. The facts she doesn’t know keep her awake nights as much as the facts she does know.

“I don’t know the whole story. I don’t see the papers. When he calls me from jail, he tells me he doesn’t have time to talk about it because others need to use the telephone. I think he’s embarrassed to talk about it.”

She has seen him only once in the past year: that day in the jail visiting room. For that, she drove 1,000 miles round trip. “Mom, I really don’t like the idea of you coming over here,” Woodward told her.

“Finally, I said, ‘Michael, I’m coming to see you regardless of what you say.’ He was my baby, and he’ll always be.”