Doctors, pharmacists charged in pill bust
Opioid crackdown called the nation’s largest ever
CINCINNATI – Federal prosecutors charged 60 physicians and pharmacists Wednesday with illegally handing out opioid prescriptions in what they say is the biggest crackdown of its kind in U.S. history.
Some of the doctors are accused of trading drugs for sex, giving prescriptions to Facebook friends without proper exams and unnecessarily pulling teeth to justify writing pain prescriptions.
The list includes podiatrists, orthopedic specialists, dentists, general practitioners and nurse practitioners.
Prosecutors said the specialties and methods varied, but the result in every case was the same: People addicted to pain medication received dangerous amounts of opioids, including oxycodone, methadone and morphine.
They said the illegal prescriptions put as many as 32 million pain pills in the hands of patients.
A special strike force from the Justice Department began making arrests early Wednesday, primarily in rural areas across Appalachia, which has been especially hard-hit by addiction to heroin and pain medication.
Most of the defendants face charges of unlawful distribution of controlled substances involving prescription opioids. Authorities say they gave out about 350,000 improper prescriptions in Alabama, Kentucky, Ohio, Tennessee and West Virginia.
Prosecutors described the doctors involved as drug dealers and said they were seeing a total of about 28,000 patients at the time of their arrests. “If so-called medical professionals are going to behave like drug dealers, we’re going to treat them like drug dealers,” said Brian Benczkowski, an assistant attorney general at the Justice Department.
The arrests included a doctor in Kentucky who is accused of signing off on prescriptions via Facebook, without ever seeing the patients. Other doctors are accused of handing out pills directly for cash payments, including to pregnant women.
Some people were given treatments they did not need in order to get the prescriptions filled. Benczkowski mentioned a dentist who is accused of unnecessarily pulling a patient’s teeth.
The range of schemes included sending patients across state borders to see another general practitioner, writing prescriptions at different intervals rather than the originally prescribed number of days, and having patients fill prescriptions at different pharmacies.
Across America, almost 218,000 people died from overdoses related to prescription opioids from 1999 to 2017, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. Overdose deaths involving prescription opioids were five times higher in 2017 than in 1999.