Doctor Made Man A Slave To Drugs To Get Free Goods

By RICHARD GREEN (AP) – THE SEATTLE TIMES – 6/5/98

PORTLAND – A jury returned a $900,000 malpractice verdict yesterday against a urologist accused of keeping a car salesman addicted to painkillers to get free tuneups, tires and gasoline.

Larry Benson said his 15 years of virtual servitude began when he was a grocery-store manager and the doctor used the drugs as bait to get free pizzas, cans of soda and slabs of cheese.

“I feel vindicated,” Benson said after the verdict in Multnomah County Circuit Court. “Nobody ever believed the story at first. It was so incredible. Everybody thought I was nuts. Everybody said that a doctor wouldn’t do it. He did it because of greed and power.”

The verdict against Dr. David R. Rosencrantz came nearly two years after the state Board of Medical Examiners suspended his license for nine months and fined him $5,000 for prescribing drugs inappropriately to Benson.

Neither Rosencrantz nor his attorney returned telephone calls yesterday. The one-time physician to the late Oregon Gov. Tom McCall first treated Benson for testicular cancer in 1979.

He removed one of Benson’s testicles and gave Benson samples of painkillers such as Vicodin and Percocet to relieve persistent migraine headaches.

Benson claimed that for the next 15 years, the doctor demanded free goods and services in exchange for the drugs, supplying the pills in envelopes or tissue paper.

It escalated from his supermarket days, Benson said, when the doctor would make special requests for free food.

“He loved the Kraft cheese,” Benson said. “He said his wife was a vegetarian and they needed it.”

“I would call him at 10 o’clock at night and be in tears my head hurt so bad,” Benson said. “At 6 the next morning he would call and say `My salesman just gave me some more pills, but I need new tires for my Jeep, or I need a tuneup. I worked on his cars, his mother’s car, his kids’ cars.”

“He would ride around in my cars for months at a time. I sold used cars, and he didn’t like it. I always had new cars for me and my wife and those were the ones he would borrow,” he said.

Benson said his psychologist told him to tell somebody in authority, but he feared no one would believe him, so he tape-recorded their telephone conversations.

Meanwhile, Benson’s headaches were getting worse, even though he was taking 10 to 12 pills a day.

“The doctor sabotaged efforts to break the addiction,” said Benson’s lawyer, Gregory Kafoury. “He turned my client into a junkie and a slave… . This is a case of unparalleled ugliness.”

Kafoury said the tapes were damning evidence at trial.

Benson said the doctor said on the tapes that he couldn’t tell anyone about what was going on.

In one of the taped conversations, the doctor advised Benson to lie to his insurance company about where he was getting the drug samples.

The $900,000 verdict includes $600,000 in compensation and $300,000 in punitive damages.

Benson, 42, has undergone treatment for his addiction and he said he rarely gets headaches any more.