Owner of ‘pill mill’ clinic sentenced to federal prison
A former owner and manager of a Milwaukee pain clinic that prosecutors dubbed a “pill mill” for opioids has been sentenced to a year and a day in federal prison.
Susan Moyer, 58, of Milwaukee ran Compassionate Care Clinic, on West Capitol Drive in Wauwatosa, with physician Steven Kotsonis. According to prosecutors, the pair prescribed high does of Oxycodone and other opioids to customers for cash from about 2013 to 2015. They were charged in 2016, and each pleaded guilty to conspiracy and unlawful distribution of a controlled substance in 2019.
Moyer was sentenced last week and will serve two years of supervision after release. Kotsonis was sentenced last summer to the same prison term, plus three years of supervision. He has lost his medical license.
Moyer, despite no medical training, degree, or license, would write out the prescriptions for Kotsonis’s signature. During one recorded visit by an undercover informant, she referred to herself as the “Oxy Czar.”
At least two of the clinic’s many patients suffered fatal overdoses after obtaining the unlawful prescriptions, according to court records
In a sentencing memo, Moyer’s attorney described that she had become a heavy user of opioids after being seriously injured in an automobile crash in the 1980s and was reinjured in two subsequent crashes.
By the time she worked at Compassionate Care, the memo reads, she was heavily addicted, taking as many as a couple dozen 20mg Oxycodone pills, plus other drugs, a day.
“It is apparent from the videos which were recorded during the investigation, that she was impaired for most of the day,” the memo states. “Clearly, her speech and judgment were significantly, negatively impacted by the drugs.
Today, it said, she suffers from a plethora of physical ailments and is cared for by family members.
The U.S. Drug Enforcement Administration investigated the case, and is “committed to identifying and investigating those individuals who use their positions of trust to become drug dealers for personal profit,” said DEA Wisconsin Assistant Special Agent in Charge John McGarry.