The Tomah, Wisconsin VA medical center prescribes so many opiates to veterans, the place has been dubbed “Candy Land.”

The Milwaukee Journal Sentinel reports:

They call the hospital’s chief of staff, psychiatrist David Houlihan, the “Candy Man.”

Current and former hospital staff members describe patients who show up to appointments stoned on painkillers and muscle relaxants, doze off and drool during therapy sessions, and burn themselves with cigarettes. They told The Center for Investigative Reporting that Houlihan himself “doped up” or “zombified” their patients and that workers who raised questions have been punished.

Data obtained by CIR shows the number of opiate prescriptions at the Tomah VA more than quintupled from 2004, the year before Houlihan became chief of staff of the hospital, to 2012, even as the number of veterans seeking care at the hospital declined. In August, a 35-year-old Marine Corps veteran died of an overdose in the inpatient psychiatric ward.

“It’s a system that’s gone completely haywire,” said Ryan Honl, a Gulf War veteran and graduate of the U.S. Military Academy at West Point who in October resigned from his position as a secretary in the hospital’s mental health clinic after two months, filing a federal whistle-blower complaint on his way out.

The problems at this rural medical center underscore the difficulty the VA is having maintaining standards of quality patient care, even after a national scandal forced VA Secretary Eric Shinseki to resign in May.

The exponential growth in the use of narcotics transformed the Tomah VA from a conservative prescriber of painkillers to one typical of runaway opiate prescription practices throughout the VA health care system.

“Houlihan is a symptom of failed leadership from Washington on down,” Honl says. “They turn the other way while veterans, who expect to be taken care of after the politicians send them to war, suffer.”