Dozens of doctors and other medical workers were charged Wednesday with illegally prescribing millions of opioid pills.
“The 60 people indicted include 31 doctors, seven pharmacists, eight nurse practitioners and seven other licensed medical professionals,” reports the Washington Post. “The charges involve more than 350,000 illegal prescriptions” — most of them written in the Appalachian regions of West Virginia, Ohio, Kentucky, Tennessee, and Alabama.
The federal charges include unlawful distribution or dispensing of controlled substances by a medical professional and health-care fraud; conviction on just one count could send a defendant to prison for 20 years.
An assistant attorney general told the Post the illegal prescriptions totaled more than 32 million pills — “the equivalent of one opioid dose for every man, woman and child in the five states in the region.”
“If these medical professionals behave like drug dealers, you can rest assured that the Justice Department is going to treat them like drug dealers,” said Brian Benczkowski, who created the Appalachian Regional Prescription Strike Force last year.
The indictment, unsealed in federal court in Cincinnati, “lists other alleged abuses by medical professionals that include filling fraudulent prescriptions, prescribing opioids to known addicts, and providing Facebook friends with opioid prescriptions based on messenger requests,” reports CBS News.
The Centers for Disease Control say about 115 Americans die from opioid-related causes, every day.
The National Institute of Drug Abuse calculated that “over 70,000 Americans died of drug abuse in 2017,” CBS says, “including 47,000 from any opioid and 28,400 from fentanyl and its analogs.”
“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.
Other numbers cited in Wednesday’s indictment are startling. One Tennessee doctor allegedly prescribed more than 4 million opioid pills. And a pharmacy in Dayton OH — a so-called “pill mill” — allegedly prescribed and sold more than 1.75 million doses.
Those charged didn’t always seek money: a doctor in Tennessee who called himself the “Rock Doc” allegedly exchanged opioids and other pills for sex.
Wednesday’s indictments “come as more than 1,500 cities, counties, Native American tribes and unions are suing drug companies in one of the largest and most complicated civil cases in American history,” the Post says.
