The indictments announced Wednesday are part of the Justice Department’s broader effort to fight the nation’s opioid abuse crisis. They include a man in Tennessee who called himself the “Rock Doc” and allegedly prescribed medication in exchange for sex; another medical professional who prosecutors say recruited prostitutes to become patients and let them use drugs at his house; another who wrote prescriptions on behalf of Facebook friends; and a dentist accused of needlessly pulling teeth to justify giving his patients addictive drugs.
The charges involve more than 350,000 illegal prescriptions written in Kentucky, Alabama, Ohio, Tennessee and West Virginia, according to the indictments. Prosecutors say medical professionals knowingly provided addictive drugs to vulnerable patients, accepted costly cash payments, signed blank prescription forms to be completed by their staffs and billed Medicare and Medicaid for unnecessary tests and procedures.
The cases reflect a larger push by the Justice Department in recent years against health-care practitioners who recklessly prescribe the kinds of powerful drugs that have fueled the nation’s opioid epidemic and resulted in more than 47,000 deaths in the U.S. in 2017, according to federal data.
Federal authorities have been particularly focused on the hard-hit Appalachian region, which has been ravaged by addiction, relying on a variety of data to reveal which doctors are the biggest prescribers and how far patients are traveling to see them along with other information.
“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. Mr. Barr, like President Trump’s first attorney general, former Sen. Jeff Sessions of Alabama, has said the problem is one of his top priorities.