For more than a year while he was dean of USC’s medical school, Dr. Carmen Puliafito abused drugs on days he worked as an eye doctor in university facilities and “would return to his medical office to see patients within hours of using methamphetamine,” a state investigation alleges.
Puliafito consumed heroin, methamphetamine and other drugs on a near daily basis at the Keck School of Medicine campus and in other locations, and the physician supplied drugs to other people, including a teenager and a patient in an addiction treatment facility, according to a filing that details the results of an investigation conducted for the Medical Board of California.
A Los Angeles Times investigation in July first sparked the state probe. It may have serious implications for both Puliafito, who could lose his medical license, and the reputation of the university that kept a troubled person in one of its most important and sensitive posts.
Arthur Caplan, the founding head of the Division of Bioethics at New York University’s Langone Medical Center, called the medical board filing describing Puliafito’s alleged misconduct a “grim litany” and said it ranks among the worst cases against a physician that he had seen.
Read the full story on LATimes.com.