Law Commons^™

Prosecuting Doctors For Trusting Patients, Deborah Hellman

Faculty Scholarship

In an escalating phase of our country’s war on drugs, doctors treating patients in pain are being prosecuted for drug trafficking under the Controlled Substances Act. While doctors surely can be guilty of drug trafficking when they sell drugs for money, lately some doctors have been prosecuted for violations of a statute that requires knowingly distributing or dispensing controlled substances in an unauthorized manner for simply being willfully blind to the fact that their patients were reselling the drugs. While willful blindness may be an apt substitute for knowledge in the traditional drug courier scenario, doctors in these cases are …