Did a Miami doctor make $4,500 a day off opioid addicts without getting out of his car?
A 72-year-old South Miami doctor has been sentenced to 10 years in federal prison for prescribing pain and anxiety drugs to pain clinic customers without examination, sometimes without getting out of his car or being in the United States, prosecutors said.
Dr. Osmin Morales owned the Miami Pain Relief Institute. He also saw patients — or, at least, prescribed pills — one day a week at Yanet Perez’s Reliable Alliance Health Care from May 2015 through December 2020.
Morales’ side work at Reliable led to guilty verdicts on charges of conspiracy to unlawfully dispense and distribute oxycodone and morphine; unlawfully distributing and dispensing oxycodone and alprazolam (brand name Xanax); unlawfully distributing and dispensing oxycodone; unlawfully distributing and dispensing oxycodone and morphone; and three counts of unlawfully distributing oxycodone.
Morales was acquitted on five similar counts. His co-defendants each pleaded guilty to a single charge.
Yanet Perez got two years, six months and Elaine Perez got four years, nine months for conspiracy to unlawfully dispense and distribute oxycodone and morphine. Bonnie Newborn Hughes awaits her sentence for conspiracy to unlawfully dispense and distribute controlled substances.
Before U.S. Judge James I. Cohn handed down Morales’ time Thursday, defense attorney Jonathan Meltz of The Chapman Law Group argued for a three-year sentence.
Meltz said Morales had decompression neck surgery in March, and still felt effects from his May 3, 2018, stroke. He had been diagnosed that same year as having myelodysplasia, which the Cleveland
Clinic says is a symptom of a person not having “enough healthy blood cells.”
“We think it’s a reasonable assumption to think that imposition of a 20year term of imprisonment will be a life sentence for Dr. Morales,” Meltz said. “A 10-year sentence will probably bring the same result. A 5-year sentence might do the same.”
In arguing for more years, Department of Justice Assistant U.S. Attorney Frank Tamen pointed to the words of Yanet Perez, in her guilty plea and as a witness during Morales’ trial.
Perez’s admission of facts with her guilty plea said Morales sometimes didn’t come to the clinic, but still handed out prewritten prescriptions.
“On some Wednesdays, he pre-wrote their prescriptions; arrived at the parking lot and handed [Perez] an envelope containing controlled substance prescriptions for that day’s patients, and never got out of his car,” Tamen wrote in court documents. “At least one patient corroborated her testimony, stating that they saw him arrive in the parking lot and give an envelope to Yanet Perez, but he did not come into the clinic.”
Newborn Hughes’ guilty plea said she literally rubber-stamped Morales’ signature on some prescriptions. Newborn Hughes’ admission also says, after the stroke, Morales didn’t come to the clinic for part of 2019. His patients never missed their drugs, however.
Morales “issued a minimum of 25 prescriptions every day it was open, for which he received a cash payment of $100 each,” Tamen wrote. “Often the number of patients exceeded 25, and Morales sometimes received $4,500 to $6,000 from a day’s operation.”
In a pre-sentencing filing, Meltz denied that Morales wrote prescriptions ahead of time without seeing patients or that he knew about any forging or rubber-stamping of his signature.
“In addition, [Morales] did not know notes for purported exams or consultations were cut and pasted from Internet articles by [Newborn Hughes, Perez and Perez],” Meltz wrote.