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By Leslie Berestein
UNION-TRIBUNE STAFF WRITER

December 6, 2003

It was mind-bogglingly easy for Ryan Haight to buy the drugs that helped kill him. No driving to meet a dealer in a sketchy neighborhood, no nervous glances in the rear-view mirror. All it took was a computer in the family den.

On Dec. 6, 2000, a few weeks before his 18th birthday, Ryan sat down in front of the terminal at home in La Mesa and clicked onto an online pharmacy site. Then, according to court documents, he filled out a request for 100 tablets of hydrocodone, a generic version of the powerful narcotic painkiller Vicodin.

Two days later, on Dec. 8, the drugs arrived in the mail C.O.D., no questions asked.

On Feb. 12, 2001, Ryan's mother found him dead.

An autopsy revealed that Ryan died from a mixture of hydrocodone, morphine and other drugs he combined in an ill-fated attempt to get high. Both the hydrocodone and the morphine were purchased over the Internet.

Yesterday, San Diego Superior Court Judge Ronald Styn found Dr. Robert Ogle of Rockwall, Texas, financially responsible for Ryan's death.

The 56-year-old general practitioner, whose name was found on a bottle of hydrocodone in the dead boy's room, was ordered to pay $2 million in damages to the boy's parents, Francine and Bruce Haight. The boy's mother is a former nurse; his father is an eye surgeon.

"I couldn't believe a doctor would do something like this," said Francine Haight, who found her son's body after he had been dead for 12 hours, lying on his bed as she had last seen him the night before. "This is someone that is supposed to be taking care of patients, healing them. They didn't care. They were just in it for the money."

Ogle, who stands to lose his medical license in Texas, previously surrendered his license in 1983 after he was found guilty of felony charges related to non-therapeutic prescribing of controlled substances, earning him a three-year prison sentence. His license was reinstated in 1985.

The Haight family's attorney, Todd Macaluso, said he will pursue collection of the award in Texas. Ogle's attorney, Andrea Nation of Dallas, said Ogle was uninsured for the boy's death, and that he lacks the personal assets to cover the award.

"There are no winners here at all," she said.

Macaluso said that in the absence of insurance, a possibility he is still looking into, the award could be partly covered by assets seized by the federal government in a related criminal case involving Ogle.

The physician and five other individuals are awaiting sentencing in Texas on criminal charges that stem from their involvement with Main Street Pharmacy, an Oklahoma-based business that operated nationpharmacy.com, and another online pharmacy based in Texas.

Main Street Pharmacy and its owner, Texas pharmacist Clayton Fuchs, 33, were also sued by the Haights and were named in the lawsuit as having sold the hydrocodone to their son. The family agreed to an insurance settlement of $250,000 from Fuchs in September. In October, Fuchs and another Texas pharmacist, Waldrick Lemons, 30, were convicted by a federal jury on charges of conspiracy to dispense a controlled substance. In addition, Fuchs was convicted of money laundering and operating a continuing criminal enterprise. His father-in-law, Eugene Gonzales, 49, was convicted of money laundering.

Ogle and another Texas physician who allegedly wrote prescriptions for Fuchs' online pharmacies pled guilty to charges of conspiracy to illegally distribute a controlled substance and money laundering; a third pled guilty only to the first charge. An Oklahoma doctor also allegedly involved, Ricky Joe Nelson, is serving time for prescribing addictive narcotics over the Internet.

Nationpharmacy.com was what is known as a "rogue" pharmacy. Such unlicensed online operations make most of their money not by selling maintenance drugs to impoverished little old ladies but by pushing highly addictive narcotics like hydrocodone or dangerous diet drugs over the Internet.

According to federal prosecutors, the online pharmacy business run by Clayton Fuchs did roughly 75 percent of its sales in hydrocodone. Between Jan. 1, 2000, and March 30, 2001, his business generated about $5.6 million in controlled-substance sales. Federal prosecutors are seeking full restitution of the amount.

Rogue pharmacies have recently come under increasing legal and public scrutiny. Earlier this week, executives of the Internet search engine Google announced they would no longer accept advertising from unlicensed pharmacies, following similar decisions last month by Yahoo and Microsoft.

On Wednesday, federal agents arrested Miami businessman Vincent Chhabra, who is accused of owning businesses that ran several drug Web sites. He and nine others, including five doctors and a pharmacist, have been indicted on charges that include money laundering and issuing controlled substances over the Internet, primarily diet pills.

According to the federal Drug Enforcement Administration, a prescription based solely upon an online questionnaire is not valid, and the distribution of controlled substances without a valid prescription is illegal. But the borderless nature of online pharmacies makes it easy for rogue operators to stay a step ahead of the law, and difficult for regulators to keep up.

Poorly funded state pharmacy and medical boards find themselves at a disadvantage. California's state medical board had a full-time investigator tracking online prescribers, but when he left the job, he could not be replaced because of a hiring freeze.

Francine Haight, while relieved that those she believes responsible for her son's death are being punished, finds this knowledge disquieting. She still has a sixth-grader at home to worry about.

"It is very scary," said Haight, who is separated from Ryan's father and raising her youngest son in Laguna Niguel. "A lot of parents are not aware this is around. They are more concerned about pornography, and they are not aware of what a danger this can be."

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