Pill-pushing celebrity doctors help patients manipulate system. (Health Care).

JULES Mark Lusman is not the first doctor to get in trouble for pushing pills on the rich and famous.

Lusman, who lost his license for illegally providing prescription drugs to Winona Ryder and other celebrities, is simply the latest in a long line.

Remember Westside psychiatrist Nomi J. Fredrick, who had her license stripped for over-prescribing addictive prescription drugs to Don Simpson, the movie producer who died of a drug overdose in 1996? Or George Nichopoulos, Elvis' personal physician?

But just how many of them are out there?

If you talk to the California Medical Board, not that many--at least not officially. The board estimates that it disciplines less than a dozen doctors each year for violating prescription laws and perhaps only one has Hollywood clients. But the board acknowledges that those are only the ones who are caught.

"If a celebrity is involved with it and we don't find out some other way we just don't know," said Dave Thornton, the medical board's chief of investigations.

"Back in the '70s and '80s it was more prevalent than it is today."

If patients pay cash, go to several different pharmacies and are prescribed medication like Vicodin that is not tracked by the Drug Enforcement Administration, it is virtually impossible to trace.

Dr. Gary Jaeger, president of the California Society of Addiction Medicine, believes there are few doctors who intentionally over-prescribe uppers, downers, painkillers and other addictive drags-- whether for celebrities or the average patient.

Instead, he believes addicts know how to manipulate the health system, whether through doctor shopping, fooling gullible physicians with fake illnesses or going to urgent care clinics where doctors have little personal relationship with patients.

Staff reporter Laurence Darmiento can be reached at [phone] ext. 237 or at [e-mail].