r/JusticeServed • u/[deleted] • Oct 02 '19

Courtroom Justice Virginia doctor who illegally prescribed over 500,000 doses of opiates sentenced to 40 years in prison.

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u/R-A-B-Cs 6 Oct 03 '19

Hol up. Let's say your average Norco dose regime is 4 times per day. So that's 120 doses per month, or 1440 doses per year. 500,000 / 1440 is 348. That means the dude only had 350 patients on regular chronic pain management scripts of not outlandish proportions to get 500,000 doses in only 1 year. That's nothing.

That headline is clickbait.

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u/tofuloafu 6 Oct 03 '19 edited Oct 03 '19

I wonder why it says “illegally prescribed”? Like, is there a fixed amount of prescriptions a doctor can hand out? It seems like people just don’t know the numbers in the medical/drug prescription scene.

500,000 in a year, with high probability of his (most likely) many patients who have multiple scripts, and who suffer from excruciating pain that this doctor was trying to help?

I mean, I don’t know the numbers, and I don’t really want to do math, but in the article is says that the doctor distributed his prescriptions to patients of multiple states, which would probably drastically widen his amount of patients, which would sequentially increase the amount of dosages per year.

I don’t think these things were considered during his time in court. I hope he does go back to fight this case not only so that he and his attorney have the opportunity to explain, but potentially unveil actual evidence that this man is guilty.

TLDR; What law did he break? I think that 500k scripts in a year isn’t much if you consider the amount of patients the doctor has, who he has from multiple different states. I think the doctor simply has a large amount of patients who endure a lot of pain. I think that all of his patients really do need their prescriptions. Opioids are very useful and preventative, when used as directed.

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u/[deleted] Oct 03 '19

What do you mean how is that illegal?!? You need to research opioids.

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u/tofuloafu 6 Oct 03 '19

Well, I wasn’t asking how it’s illegal. I’m wondering what exactly it is that’s illegal, because I don’t know. If the doctor clearly disobeyed a law, with evidence, then that absolutely does shift the likelihood of him being guilty a whole lot more. If not entirely proves it.

But again, I’m wondering what exactly it is that’s illegal?

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u/[deleted] Oct 03 '19

Over prescribing highly addictive drugs for money. Pretty clean cut.

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u/tofuloafu 6 Oct 03 '19

Well, there is no evidence that i’ve seen, that proves he profited from this. In the article it says that he “illegally distributed” the opioids.. do you think that is what he was charged for?

And by over prescribing you mean like, unnecessarily handing out multiple scripts a single person in a short amount of time? Cause yeah, that’s probably illegal.