Doctors Seeing Increased Scrutiny and Punishment for Reckless Opiate Prescribing

We always are paying attention to the critical juncture of the opiate epidemic that occurs when a patient is given a prescription to “legally” obtain the addictive and potentially deadly drugs.

doctor-in-jail
Thankfully the Criminal Justice System is Acting

Increasingly, physicians assistants are getting ensnared in the corrupt prescribing of narcotic drugs, and this is somewhat expected considering their access to granting the drugs combined with the incredible sums that illicit prescribing can generate.

The doctors themselves are the ones that we feel particular disdain for, because they have so much more training and have taken the hippocratic oath not to harm their patiens.

We’ve written about Lisa Tseng getting arrested right at her office located in a Rowland Heights strip mall in Los Angeles and felt that it was a significant “shot fired” against one of the most guilty perpetrators of the opiate addiction and overdose crisis: the greedy MDs who prescribe addicted men and women unbelievable quantities of opiate drugs.

Just a few days ago, in the middle class Long Island neighborhood of Baldwin, Dr. Anand Persaud was sentenced to a 6 month prison term for illegally selling oxycodone prescriptions. His prison term will be followed up with five years of probation.  The original arrest was made in 2013, and Dr. Persaud was flagged for being one of the state’s top prescribers of narcotic medications.  He often provided medication without even giving the addicted patients a proper exam. This according to Newsday’s coverage of the arrest.

Down in Albany, Georgia, Dr. Edd Colbert Jones III has also been sentence for a greed driven scheme to disseminate narcotic painkillers and anxiety medications like Xanax.  This case displays even more reckless and greedy action than the two mentioned above because Dr. Jones III conspired with a patient named Shannon Benedict to prescribe her large quantities of medication which she then sold illegally on the black market. Dr. Jones III is facing up to 20 years of prison and/or up to a $1 million fine.