If there was any doubt that Dr. Jong Bek’s office in Gary was the place to get painkillers, the patients lining up outside at 5 a.m. soon erased it.

Bek in 2005 was sentenced to 41 months in federal prison for illegally prescribing controlled substances, but he’s not the only doctor known on the street as a “Candyman” or “Dr. Feelgood.”

Since 2003, four other Indiana doctors have been hit with criminal charges by federal prosecutors for prescribing powerful, addictive narcotics to patients who didn’t need them.

But catching them is difficult, and proving that a doctor is knowingly supplying abusers with drugs can be harder. Just ask officials in Wells County.

In early 2006, there were six deaths from overdoses on fentanyl patches in just a couple of months in a county that rarely has any overdose deaths. Investigators traced the patches back to patients who had been selling their prescriptions – prescriptions they all got from one doctor.

Much of the investigation could have been avoided if law enforcement officials had been allowed to use a state database that tracks every single narcotics prescription in the state.

When they eventually were allowed to use the database, it returned a report that was almost 8 inches thick, Bluffton Police Det. Steve Cale said.

“It was several hundred pages” of narcotics prescriptions the doctor had written, Cale said. “We were surprised by the number of patients this doctor was seeing.”

Indiana’s INSPECT database was created in 1994 but has seen widespread usage only in recent years. Even then, its use is heavily restricted and is mainly for doctors to ensure patients are not “doctor shopping” to get drugs to abuse.

Law enforcement officials can use it only if they have an active investigation. For example, Bluffton police were barred from using it to see who had written the most narcotics prescriptions in Wells County during the overdose outbreak.

Mike, a northeast Indiana law enforcement officer who works undercover drug cases, said the restriction ties his hands unnecessarily.

“I’m just looking into abuse,” Mike said. “I wish I could have that. … When it’s an epidemic, maybe we ought to look at it.”

But the rules won’t change until the 1994 law that created the database changes, said Josh Klatte, who runs the database for the Indiana Professional Licensing Agency.

The law was changed in 2007 to let doctors check on drug-seeking patients, and the database is now accessed for that purpose about 1,500 times a day, Klatte said. But overdose deaths are not slowing down.

Other states with similar restricted access have said doctors might be discouraged from reporting prescriptions if they think it could be used to investigate them. So police must already have a suspect before they can get the data the state collects.

And even with the database data as evidence, convictions are difficult.

Bluffton’s Cale said there was never enough evidence to bring charges against the doctor in the case. On the other hand, the investigation alone may have been enough to change his prescribing habits – Wells County has not had a death from an accidental narcotics overdose since.

dstockman@jg.net