Justice Department charges 60 for prescribing 32 million painkillers

The Justice Department charged more than 60 healthcare providers Wednesday with illegally prescribing 32 million painkillers through fraudulent schemes involving patients they knew suffered from addiction.

“We will not stand by and allow the harmful and oftentimes deadly practice of over-prescribing highly addictive drugs to continue unchecked,” FBI Executive Assistant Director Amy Hess said in a statement. “The FBI will pursue medical personnel who misuse their positions of trust to blatantly disregard others’ very lives for their own financial gain.”

Some of the doctors who were prosecuted traded drugs for sex or told patients to pick up their medications at different pharmacies so they could stockpile medications. One doctor left signed, blank prescription pads for patients to pick up even when he wasn’t in the office. Another was a dentist who pulled patients’ teeth in order to justify giving them painkillers.

Among those indicted were 31 doctors, eight nurse practitioners, and seven pharmacists across Alabama, Kentucky, Ohio, Tennessee, and West Virginia.

“The opioid epidemic is the deadliest drug crisis in American history, and Appalachia has suffered the consequences more than perhaps any other region,” Attorney General William Barr said in a statement.

In particularly large cases in Tennessee, one doctor is accused of prescribing about 4.2 million pain pills, and another is charged with prescribing approximately 300,000 hydrocodone pills, 200,000 oxycodone pills, 2,500 fentanyl patches, and 180,000 benzodiazepine pills. A doctor in Alabama is accused of recruiting prostitutes he was having sex with to become patients at his clinic and use drugs at his house.

The charges came as the U.S. is in the middle of a public health crisis that started with the over-prescribing of opioid painkillers such as oxycontin. As the drugs have become more regulated, people are turning to the drug’s illicit alternative, heroin, which is often mixed with the more deadly drug fentanyl. More than 47,000 people died of opioid overdoses in 2017, about a third of which involved prescription drugs.