Dreamland: Part 1: Liberace Shows the Way Summary & Analysis

In the late-1990s, David Procter, unlike much of the rest of Portsmouth, is doing well: he owns a mansion, a pool, and fancy cars. Despite being investigated by the Kentucky Board of Medical Licensure in the late 1980s for aggressive prescription of opiates, he is able to keep his license, as he hadn’t technically broken any Kentucky laws.

In the beginning, it seemed as though Procter wanted what was best for his patients: records suggest he consulted with other doctors and discontinued medications “just as frequently” as he prescribed them. But a decade later, Procter is exhausted by his pain patients. A second investigation suggests that he regularly prescribes patients painkillers and sedatives “with almost no diagnosis or suggestions for other treatment, such as physical therapy.” Procter’s time spent catering to “vulnerable […] and manipulative people who used drugs and the government dole to navigate economic disaster” has “corroded” his “medical ethics.”

“If heroin was the perfect drug for drug traffickers,” explains Quinones, “OxyContin was ideal for these pill mill doctors.” OxyContin is “ideal” because it is legal, and it creates addicts who need to become regular customers to support their habit. Procter is one of the first doctors take advantage of the “business model” OxyContin presented. Jeremy Wilder was an addict from Aberdeen, Ohio who also took advantage of the business opportunities OxyContin presented. Wilder collected OxyContin prescriptions from doctors around Ohio and Kentucky and, by the mid-1990s, had become “the biggest pill dealer in Aberdeen.” Jeremy would pay for appointments at pill mills and the prescriptions themselves and then sell the pills for a profit. He started abusing the pills before ultimately turning to the newly-arrived black tar heroin.

In the late 1990s, the Kentucky Board of Medical Licensure receives complaints pointing to the complete lack of medical knowledge involved in Procter’s prescriptions and diagnoses. Three female patients apparently exchanged sex with him for prescriptions. In 1998, Procter suffers a car accident that ended his career as a physician. He forfeits his medical license but hires other medical staff—often questionable doctors with “histories of drug use, previously suspended licenses, and mental problems”—to run his clinic. Some of these doctors end up opening their own pill mills.

Eventually, the DEA investigates Plaza Healthcare, Procter’s original clinic. Procter “fle[es] to Canada” after “plead[ing] guilty to conspiring to distribute prescription medication.” Canada returns him to Kentucky, where he testifies against other pill mill doctors in exchange for a lighter sentence. He is eventually sentenced to eleven years in federal prison. Rather poetically, Procter serves his time at the facility in Lexington, Kentucky that once housed the Narcotic Farm. Procter and other pill mill doctors provided economically depressed industrial towns with “some of [their] first locally owned business in years,” effectively demonstrating a “brand-new business model.”