Officials called the case the “single largest prescription opioid law enforcement operation in history.”
The indictments, unsealed in federal court in Cincinnati on Wednesday, accuse 60 people, including 31 doctors, seven pharmacists and eight nurses, of involvement in the schemes, which included opioid prescriptions issued for gratuitous medical procedures like unnecessary tooth-pulling, and in some cases doctors simply handing 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. Most of the charges were filed against people in those five states; one person was charged in Pennsylvania and one in Louisiana.
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.
Prosecutors accused the medical professionals who were charged Wednesday of conducting a wide range of schemes. Some involved small leagues of doctors and their office staffs, while in other cases, people acted alone, according to the indictments.
Some doctors performed unneeded medical procedures to justify the pills they prescribed, prosecutors said, while others simply passed out prescriptions without going to the trouble of disguising their purpose.
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 doctor in Tennessee who called himself the “Rock Doc” was accused of prescribing hundreds of thousands of pills in exchange for sex.
The charges announced Wednesday include unlawful distribution of controlled substances and conspiracy to obtain controlled substances by fraud. Prosecutors said the charges could result in sentences of up to 50 years in prison.
This article originally appeared in The New York Times.