CINCINNATI, OH — Federal authorities said Wednesday they’ve arrested 60 medical professionals, including 31 doctors, in an illegal opioid prescription and distribution scheme that put millions of pills of the highly addictive drug on the black market. Defendants are in at least seven states: Alabama, Kentucky, Louisiana, Ohio, Pennsylvania, Tennessee and West Virginia.
Those arrested in the Appalachian Regional Prescription Opioid Strike Force investigation are tied to 350,000 prescriptions and 32 million pills, the Justice Department and the Department of Health and Human Services said in announcements in Cincinnati, Ohio, and Washington, D.C.
U.S. Attorney Benjamin Glassman of Cincinnati described the action as the biggest known takedown yet of drug prescribers. Robert Duncan, U.S. attorney for eastern Kentucky, called the doctors involved “white-coated drug dealers.”
The 60 people arrested also included seven pharmacists, eight nurse practitioners and seven other licensed medical professionals were arrested.
Among those charged was a Tennessee doctor who dubbed himself the “Rock Doc” and is accused of prescribing dangerous combinations of drugs such as fentanyl and oxycodone, sometimes in exchange for sex, authorities said
Others include a Kentucky doctor who is accused of writing prescriptions to Facebook friends who came to his home to pick them up, another who allegedly left signed blank prescriptions for staff to fill out and give to patients he hadn’t seen, and a Kentucky dentist accused of removing teeth unnecessarily and scheduling unneeded follow-up appointments.
A Dayton, Ohio, doctor was accused of running a “pill mill” that allegedly dispensed 1.75 million pills in a two-year period. Authorities said an Alabama doctor recruited prostitutes and other women he had sexual relations with to his clinic and allowed them to abuse drugs in his home.
Prosecutors said some of the doctors charged prescribed opioids for sex, a doctor in one case operated a pharmacy outside the exam room where patients could fill their prescriptions after receiving an exam and in another case, a dentist pulled teeth unnecessarily to justify the opioid prescriptions.
“What these doctors have done is pretty remarkable in its brazenness,” Brian Benczkowski, an assistant attorney general in charge of the Justice Department’s criminal division, told The Washington Post.
The 32 million pills are “the equivalent of one opioid dose for every man, woman and child in the five states in the region that we’ve been targeting,” Benczkowski said. “If these medical professionals behave like drug dealers, you can rest assured that the Justice Department is going to treat them like drug dealers.”
U.S. health officials have said there were more than 70,000 drug overdose deaths in 2017 — about 21.7 per 100,000 people. From 1999-2017, nearly 218,000 Americans died of opioid overdoses, according to the federal Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.
Ohio and West Virginia have been among the states with the highest overdose death rates in the burgeoning opioid crisis. Fatal overdose rates are also high in Delaware, Kentucky, Maryland, Massachusetts, New Hampshire, Pennsylvania and Rhode Island, according to the CDC.
“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 P. Barr said in a statement.
The Appalachian Regional Prescription Opioid Strike Force, created in December by the Trump administration, is expanding its investigation into Virginia, authorities said. Investigators will continue to pursue medical professionals “who misuse their positions of trust to blatantly disregard others’ very lives for their own financial gain,” the statement said.
The Associated Press contributed reporting.
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