Drugs, parties and $100,000

How a decorated doctor ended up selling crystal meth

As an ER doctor, Carlton Cash devoted his career toward helping others. But by 2019, he had a new profession: party-throwing drug dealer.

Cash found himself spending large sums of money on crystal meth, using some to throw raucous bashes in his Fort Lauderdale home and selling large quantities to lower-level dealers.

In one year alone, he estimates he spent about $100,000 on meth. Resting next to his drugs in the safe of his house was a loaded pistol in a holster.

Cash started spiraling down the wrong path ever since a near-deadly car crash got him hooked on painkillers and derailed his career in medicine, his friends say.

Court documents and accounts from those who know him paint a nuanced portrait of a man whose life quickly unraveled, leading federal investigators to begin watching his every move and arrest him in August. His friends and family who live outside of South Florida were stunned.

They said none of the details of his exploits add up to the Cash they knew. Before Cash was saddled with a long prison sentence, they wrote letters to the judge pleading for grace.

“I do not know why he did it,” Brian Beckner, a longtime friend of Cash’s from Kentucky, told the South Florida Sun Sentinel. “I do not know how he did it.”

But Ray Diaz, a former onand off-again boyfriend of Cash’s, recalls watching him dive head first into the drug trade in Fort Lauderdale.

He said he had a feeling the arrest was coming. “It was only a matter of time that he would get caught,” Diaz said.

An early end to a promising career

Before federal investigators were monitoring his drug sales in Fort Lauderdale, his loved ones said Cash led a distinguished, if not inspiring life.

As a child in Alabama, his mom said, he was diagnosed with a neuromuscular condition. But it didn’t stop him from volunteering around town helping people in need. After graduating from medical school at the University of Alabama, he started a residency at a trauma hospital in Louisville. Beckner met Cash there in 2002.

Cash was well into his residency and had earned a reputation for great care and showing up to shifts with donuts, Beckner said. On the side, Beckner said Cash took emergency room shifts in rural communities in Kentucky facing a shortage of doctors. On the road to one of those gigs in 2004, a tractor-trailer hit him head-on. A helicopter collected his mangled body and he found himself in the same trauma room he was used to working in, Beckner said.

His mother said doctors were not shy about his chances. They prepared her for the possibility that he’d be a “vegetable” due to his brain injuries. But after a long coma, he woke up and began a slow rehab. “It broke my heart to see him trying to put a puzzle together (the kind a 1-year-old would do),” she wrote in her letter.

He recovered well enough to finish his residency, going on to be an emergency room doctor in Alabama, Tennessee, Arkansas, New York, Michigan and Mississippi over the years, according to the Department of Justice.

But about six years after his accident, his family and friends said they became aware of an addiction to painkillers. In a letter from Cash and his attorney to a judge, he admitted to writing prescriptions for pills to boyfriends so he could fill them.

After a stint in rehab, Cash and friends reported a long period of sobriety. One friend who also was an addict said Cash led recovery meetings among other medical professionals struggling with addiction. But Diaz, who said he met Cash in college and began dating him on and off in 2015, said Cash never fully beat his addictions. “He was always looking for drugs,” he said.

Before his move to Fort Lauderdale in 2018 with Diaz, Cash retired early from the profession he loved due to his disabilities from the accident, friends say. While he had always struggled with low self-esteem, friends noticed him become depressed.

They said he spoke often about suicide.

One friend told the judge that Cash’s retirement “took away his purpose in life and created more low self-esteem.” One thing it did bring, according to the Department of Justice, was a $15,000 monthly disability check.

A fateful move

With the money and time on his hands, Cash’s family said, he decided to leave them and move to Fort Lauderdale with Diaz.

Everything became foggy after that. When they spoke to him, his family said nothing tipped them off about the life he was leading.

But Cash told a judge his trouble started in April 2019, on a day he “will always regret”: The day he said he tried crystal meth for the first time as a way to fit in with the local gay scene.

After getting hooked on the drug, Cash said he began to throw parties where he would supply large amounts of crystal meth.

Before he and Cash broke up in September 2019, Diaz recalled Cash inviting “hordes” of unknown men over at least once a month and supplying them with drugs.

Later Diaz said he began to notice Cash acting odd, often going to UPS or FedEx to ship and receive packages. Near the end of their relationship, he said Cash was meeting openly with drug suppliers in the home. “He was very messy,” Diaz said.

In court filings, Cash said he formed a $250-a-day habit. Within a year, he said he spent about $100,000 on crystal meth. According to Cash, the habit and desire to keep his new friends turned him onto dealing it for profits to stay afloat.

Not a ‘typical defendant’

By December 2019, investigatorsfrom the Drug Enforcement Administration were onto him. A lower-level dealer Cash sold drugs to turned into an informant. The informant told investigators Cash got pounds of the drug shipped from California.

After investigators recorded numerous transactions with the informant, they arrested Cash in August.

Their evidence tied him to over 150 grams of crystal meth that he’d either sold or had on him when he was arrested.

In court documents, Cash and his loved ones paint him as an addict trying to get by on drug sales.

But Christopher Macchiaroli, a former D.C. assistant U.S. attorney who has prosecuted federal cases against meth dealers in the past, said the amount of drugs Cash sold — and the fact that they were not cut up with other substances like most street meth — suggests Cash was more like a mid-level supplier.

“This isn’ t somebody selling low weight at a club,” he said, knocking back the suggestion that Cash was small time. “He’s doing this for profit.”

Cash quickly pleaded guilty to the crimes. While awaiting trial, he made requests to participate in rehab programs in prison.

Cash and his attorney said his crimes we refueled by drug addiction and mental illness.

According to public records, Cash had never been charged with a crime before his arrest. His attorney defended the guns in his possession at the time of his arrest, saying Cash had grown up in a family where guns were common and he’d always owned one.

Cash was sentenced to a mandatory minimum of 10 years. His attorney, who did not respond to requests for comment, has already filed an appeal.

Macchiaroli said the sentence seems reasonable. “Yes, he was a doctor,” he said. “But this is extremely dangerous conduct.”