Pain-pill pushin’ ‘Dr. Death’ bust
A cash-strapped Queens doctor ran his office like a deadly candy store — pocketing $120 per visit to scribble prescriptions for oxycodone, Xanax and muscle relaxers, including to three patients who died of overdoses, officials said.
Between 2012 and 2017, Dr. Lawrence Choy, a kidney doctor with no pain-treatment training, illegally prescribed an estimated million pills from his Flushing office, sources said.
Choy, 65, pleaded not guilty on Thursday to 231 counts, including manslaughter and reckless endangerment.
He was known for prescribing what drug treatment experts call “The Holy Trinity” of abused drugs — oxycodone, the muscle relaxant Somo and anti-anxiety med Xanax, which, taken together, are powerful and potentially lethal, officials said.
“This was a physician willing to write prescriptions for addictive substances based on request, rather than need,” Brian Rodriguez of the citywide Office of the Special Narcotics Prosecutor told a judge in Manhattan Supreme Court.
“He wrote over 18,000 prescriptions” over the course of his career, which began in 1981, Rodriguez said.
“Forty percent of those were for oxycodone . . . [though] he told us he did not receive training in pain management because he did not want the extra years of school.”
Choy began peddling the poisons in earnest after a financially bruising divorce, sources said. He also owed $1 million in back taxes, officials said.
His patients flocked from throughout the city, Long Island and neighboring states, officials said.
It was the Pennsylvania Attorney General’s Office that first noticed that a large number of pain killer prescriptions were flooding into the state from a lone nephrologist’s office in Queens, of- ficials said.
The three patients who died — Eliot Castillo, 35, of Queens; Michael Ries, 30, of Hauppauge, LI; and Daniel Barry, 43, of Suffolk County — were issued opioid prescriptions at more than quadruple the recommended top dosages, officials said.
Choy prescribed even to patients he knew were struggling through substance abuse treatment, officials said.