Pharmacist: Doctors prescribed dangerous doses of drugs for Anna Nicole Smith

Witness: Dangerous drug doses prescribed for Smith

LOS ANGELES — A pharmacist testified Tuesday he refused to fill a request from two doctors for drugs he believed would have killed Anna Nicole Smith if taken in the doses prescribed.

Ira Freeman, who identified hundreds of prescription he filled for the Playboy model over five years, said he drew the line on Sept. 15, 2006, when he received a faxed request from Dr. Sandeep Kapoor.

The doctor was forwarding a letter from psychiatrist Dr. Khristine Eroshevich seeking six heavy duty painkillers, opiates and muscle relaxants in large amounts, Freeman said.

“My impression was it was excessive dosing,” he said, “and if they were going to use this level there would be fatal consequences for the patient.”

Kapoor, Eroshevich and Howard K. Stern have pleaded not guilty to charges of conspiring to unlawfully provide excessive drugs to Smith, prescribing to an addict and obtaining false prescriptions involving the use of fake names.

They are not charged with Smith’s death from an overdose in 2007.

Under questioning by Deputy District attorney Renee Rose, Freeman said the six drugs he refused to supply included Dilaudid, Soma, Ativan and Methadone. Each drug was to be provided either in bottles of several hundred pills or in liquid form with syringes.

Freeman said he called Kapoor’s office because, “I was concerned about the amounts being requested and looking at them had made a decision that I was not going to supply these meds.”

Freeman said he told Kapoor: “I wouldn’t fill this request and you won’t find a pharmacy in California that will fill it.”

He added, “I may have said this is pharmaceutical suicide,” but that comment was stricken from the court record by the judge who had asked that witnesses omit inflammatory remarks.

Freeman said Kapoor’s only response was “OK” before he hung up the phone.

Later, Freeman said, he spoke to Eroshevich who said she was going to the Bahamas to see Smith and wanted him to pack the liquid Dilaudid in ice so she could take it with her.

Freeman said he called Stern, Smith’s boyfriend-lawyer who frequently picked up her prescriptions, and asked him to intervene with Eroshevich.

Attorney Brad Brunon, who represents Eroshevich, said in opening statements he would show that Eroshevich never planned to use all of the drugs at once but was taking them to Smith after the death of her son and planned to use one at a time to see which would alleviate her pain and anxiety.

Freeman said he also conferred with pharmaceutical expert Gregory Thompson, who testified earlier that the doses requested were extremely high.

When Thompson talked to Eroshevich on the phone, he asked if she was really a physician because “there was such a lack of knowledge of drugs … She did not know some of the basic terminology and didn’t have the knowledge she should have to be treating someone with these drugs.”