They sometimes go after regular people for things like doctor shopping where I live. I think it's a really crappy thing for them to do, but some prosecutors are just zealots. It is not at all uncommon for people prescribed highly addictive drugs to become addicted to them. The longer people are taking such prescriptions, the greater the likelihood the patient will become addicted. Once addicted, these people are likely to result to doctor shopping and even worse to feed their addictions. Where I live we don't see a lot of these prosecutions, but we do see some. I think we are seeing less now that they had a case where a person well known in the community was charged and the jury refused to convict. It was jury nullification pure and simple, and I'm glad they did it. This was a good guy with a serious health condition for which he was frequently prescribed heavy duty pain medications. He did get addicted and he did go to doctors all over town getting prescriptions. He didn't do this though because he's such a terrible person. He did it because he happened to be one of those unlucky enough to become addicted to pain medications he was prescribed for a legitimate health problem. This is one area where prosecutors need to use their discretion not to prosecute, or should at least handle the cases in a fashion where the people will not end up with criminal records. The final outcome with Rush is probably not that bad of an outcome actually. For a non-famous person it wouldn't be bad at all. It would ensure that he gets help, but not leave him with a criminal record. That's about as close as we can get under our current system with treating a health problem like a health problem instead of a criminal problem. Where I live though our jerk prosecutors want to stick these people with felony convictions. They aren't really looking for prison time but they want felony convictions and several years of probation where at any time for any minor violation probation can be revoked and these people can be shipped off to prison.
"likely to result to doctor shopping"
Should have said: "likely to _resort_ to doctor shopping"
prosecutors are TAUGHT everyone is guilt. Guilty of something.
Even if innocent of this crime, they are guilty of something else in the grand scheme.
Zombies.