Ex-pain pill doctor may get 157 years

The doctor once prescribed 20,000 pain pills in less than a year to one patient — an amount one juror called “insane.”

Yet Barry Schultz, who ran a West Delray practice, keeps insisting it’s not as horrible as it looks and that he acted in “good faith.”

But now he’s facing a minimum sentence of 157 years in state prison, for his convictions on 55 drug trafficking counts.

The 62-year-old felon is expected to go before a judge next week, after an appeals court recently ruled

that his previous punishment of 25 years was improper. The court found the trial judge in 2016 failed to explain why he opted to depart from the minimum term under the state’s sentencing guidelines.

As Florida deals with an opioid crisis that officials say includes 15 overdoses a day, Schultz’s case is a throwback to a crackdown on so-called “pill mills” and some opioidprescribing physicians at the beginning of the decade.

A law enforcement task force began investigating Schultz in 2010 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.

After Schultz’s arrest on a manslaughter charge in 2013 — involving a 50-year-old patient’s overdose death — Palm Beach County State Attorney Dave Aronberg said doctors must be held accountable for overprescribing drugs. He called the trafficking of narcotics “the greatest public safety threat to our state.”

Today, state and local officials are going after the nation’s largest opioid drugmakers and distributors with lawsuits intended to make them “pay for the pain and destruction they have caused.”

Florida, along with Palm Beach and Broward counties, and other communities rocked by a rise in heroin and opioid overdoses, are pursuing this litigation.

In 2016, 596 people died of opioid overdoses in Palm Beach County and 582 in Broward, according to medical examiner statistics.

After Schultz’s drug trafficking convictions in 2015, he pleaded guilty in his manslaughter case; he agreed to a five-year prison sentence and surrendered his medical license.

At Schultz’s trafficking trial, prosecutors slammed the former board-certified doctor’s prescriptions as excessive and “outrageous,” and also blasted his decision to make money by opening a pharmacy inside his medical office.

“Dr. Schultz assisted in a terrible epidemic,” Assistant State Attorney Lauren Godden said at his sentencing hearing in 2016. “He took the opportunity to profit from that.”

But Schultz testified that he kicked patients out of his practice if he suspected they were abusing the medication.

“I didn’t care about the money to the extent that I would be willing to treat somebody who was doing something illegal with their medicine,” said Schultz, who was a doctor for three decades.

He also told his jury that he had written prescriptions for tens of thousands of oxycodone pain pills because his patients with high tolerances for the drug really needed relief.

Just last month, Schultz, acting as his own attorney tried to bring his argument to the Florida Supreme Court. 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 because it “was not timely filed.”

Schultz was originally sentenced to 25 years in prison and fined $3 million, though his lawyer Marc Shiner said he had no money and it can’t be enforced.

Prosecutors had wanted a life sentence, and certainly no less than the minimum 157-year term.

The prosecutors filed an appeal, arguing that now-retired Circuit Judge Jack Cox never provided a reason for giving such a break on the punishment.

In February, the Fourth District Court of Appeal agreed that the judge got it wrong and ordered a new sentence that must follow the guidelines. The court also declared Schultz’s arguments for a new trial “are without merit.”

It will be up to Circuit Judge Laura Johnson to impose the correct sentence.

Schultz