LOS ANGELES - A surgeon was charged Monday with prescribing excessive drugs to a disabled patient to hasten his death and harvest his organs for transplantation.
Prosecutors in San Luis Obispo County said Dr. Hootan Roozrokh, 33, of San Francisco, gave a harmful drug and prescribed excessive doses of morphine and an anti-anxiety drug to 26-year-old Ruben Navarro, who was born with a metabolic disorder. Navarro died in 2006.
The prosecutor's office said in a statement that the drugs were prescribed "to accelerate Mr. Navarro's death in order to recover his organs."
Navarro had been a patient at Sierra Vista Regional Medical Center, about 240 kilometres northwest of Los Angeles. No organs were recovered because he did not die within 30 minutes after being removed from life support.
Roozrokh faces as many as eight years in state prison or as much as one year in jail and a US$20,000 fine as condition of probation.
Roozrokh's lawyer, Gerald Schwartzbach, did not immediately comment.
