Ex-doc gets 157 years for overprescribing pain pills

A former doctor convicted of overprescribing painkillers — including 20,000 pills in less than a year to one patient — was re-sentenced Tuesday to 157 years in state prison.

Barry Schultz, who ran a West Delray practice, previously had been sentenced to 25 years for his convictions on 55 counts of drug trafficking.

But earlier this year, a state appeals court agreed with prosecutors that the punishment for the 62-year-old former board-certified doctor had to be significantly higher, under state sentencing guide- On Tuesday, defense attorney Paul Walsh told Circuit Judge Laura Johnson she still could exercise her discretion and impose a less severe sentence. Prosecutor Lauren Godden asked for Schultz to receive a life sentence, or at least a minimum term of 157 years.

That’s what the judge handed Schultz, after he again insisted he only tried to help his patients feel better.

He surrendered his medical license in 2016 when he pleaded guilty to a manslaughter charge in exchange for a five-year prison sentence. That charge concerned the 2010 death of a 50-year-old patient who overdosed on methadone.

At his 2015 drug trafficking trial, prosecutors slammed Schultz’s prescriptions as “outrageous” and blasted his decilines.

sion to make money by opening a pharmacy inside his medical office.

Schultz testified that he had written prescriptions for tens of thousands of oxycodone pills because his patients with high tolerances for the drug really needed relief.

Last month, Schultz, without an attorney’s help, tried to get the Florida Supreme Court to review his case. He wrote, “some people genuinely require an unusually high dose of opioid medication that may appear to be ‘crazy’ by those who are unfamiliar with opioid pharmacology.”

But the high court dismissed the matter, ruling it “was not timely filed.”

Schultz used to be so highly regarded for his geriatric medical expertise that he was frequently called upon by the federal government to testify in nursing home patientabuse cases.

But his downfall came during a crackdown on socalled “pill mills” and some opioid-prescribing physicians. In 2010, a law enforcement task force began investigating Schultz based on a complaint from a Lake Worth pharmacy that a patient tried to fill a 30-day supply of oxycodone totaling 1,590 pills, with a dosage strength of 30 milligrams.

The doctor was arrested the following year but continued to insist he practiced in “good faith.”