Doctors Accused of Trading Opioid Prescriptions for Sex and Cash
https://www.nytimes.com/2019/04/17/us/doctor-arrested-prescription-drugs.html...The indictments accuse 60 people, including 31 doctors, seven pharmacists and eight nurses, of involvement in the schemes, which included prescribing opioids for gratuitous medical procedures like unnecessary tooth pulling. In some cases, prosecutors said, doctors simply handed out signed blank prescription forms.
“These cases involve approximately 350,000 opioid prescriptions and more than 32 million pills — the equivalent of a dose of opioids for every man, woman and child across the states of Ohio, Kentucky, Tennessee, Alabama and West Virginia combined,†Brian Benczkowski, an assistant attorney general in charge of the Justice Department’s criminal division, said at a news conference....
...Nationally, more than 70,000 deaths in 2017 were attributed to drug overdoses, with about one-quarter of them caused by prescription opioids. States wholly or partly in Appalachia recorded some of the highest rates of drug overdose deaths that year: West Virginia was first in the nation, Ohio second and Kentucky fifth.
“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....
...One of the doctors facing charges in Ohio had at one time prescribed more controlled substances than anyone else in the state, prosecutors said. A pharmacy in Dayton, Ohio, was accused of dispensing more than 1.75 million pills. And a nurse practitioner in Tennessee who called himself the Rock Doc was accused of prescribing hundreds of thousands of pills in exchange for sex....
