Doctor who sold drugs to the stars is struck off

One of the doctors who prescribed an array of heavy painkillers to Winona Ryder in the weeks before her shoplifting arrest last year has had his medical licence revoked.

An official investigation found that Dr Jules Lusman had earned a fortune providing celebrities with controlled substances on an unethical "cash-and-carry" basis.

The Medical Board of California chastised Dr Lusman, a South African-born physician ostensibly specialising in tattoo and hair removal, saying in documents made public yesterday that his behaviour was worthy of "the sub-plot of a Raymond Chandler novel".

Dr Lusman's clients included not only Ryder, identified by the Medical Board as E T (for Emily Thompson, one of the actress's pseudonyms, according to her prosecutors), but also a "fairly well known musician", C L, who used to be married to a Mr C. C L is believed to be Courtney Love, the widow of Kurt Cobain and a friend of Ryder, who has talked frankly of her addictions.

The Medical Board said Dr Lusman became known in celebrity circles for his willingness to make out-of-hours calls at homes and hotels and write prescriptions for opiates and hypnotic drugs, as well as syringes, enabling his patients to inject themselves. He would habitually charge $1,000 (£630) or more for such house-calls, which involved the briefest of physical examinations.

The board's report alleged that he was paid in cash and either did not record the transaction or recorded a much lower fee. His speciality, the report went on, was catering to "the demands of wealthy and/or famous drug-seekers for prescription narcotics which would otherwise have to be obtained on the street".

Dr Lusman was formally struck off last Friday, the same day Ryder was given three years' probation and 60 days of community service for stealing more than $5,000 of designer clothing and accessories from the Saks Fifth Avenue department store in Beverly Hills. According to Ryder's probation report, which identified Dr Lusman as one of her physicians, she was carrying eight different prescription painkillers and a hypodermic needle at the time of her arrest.

The Medical Board said Dr Lusman had prescribed many narcotics to her over the previous three months, including vicoprofen, percocet, meperidine and flexeril. On their first encounter, he gave her a prescription for 30 vicoprofen tablets, even though she told him she had obtained a prescription for 60 vicoprofens just a few days earlier. The Medical Board, castigating him for "extreme departure from the standard of care", said she paid him $1,000 in cash on that occasion.

Dr Lusman, who was fined $75,000 and faces possible criminal charges, has left America. He denies wrongdoing. "I certainly did not believe at the time I attended to her professionally that she was in an abusive situation," he told ABC from his mother's home in South Africa. "I would never, ever prescribe a person multiple medications simultaneously."

This is not, though, the first time he has fallen foul of the medical authorities. In 1986 he was denounced for "disgraceful misconduct" in overprescribing to patients in South Africa. He left for the United States in 1990.

Ryder, the probation report said, spent more than two years "doctor shopping", obtaining 37 painkiller prescriptions from 20 physicians between January 1996 and September 1998.She would present herself as Emily Thompson, or one of five other pseudonyms, at either a big chemist chain on Sunset Boulevard or a smaller dispensary in the San Fernando Valley.