Court to hear Cases of Doctors convicted in Pain Pill Schemes

On Friday, the US Supreme Court agreed to hear petitions from 2 doctors who were convicted of illegally distributing pain medication after writing thousands of prescriptions in short periods.

The Court will take up the case of Xiulu Ruan of Mobile, Alabama, & Shakeel Kahn, who practiced medicine in Ft. Mohave, Arizona, & Casper, Wyoming.

Ruan & a partner, James Couch, were convicted of overprescribing medications at their Physicians Pain Specialists of Alabama clinic & a pharmacy.

The 2 doctors wrote 66,892 prescriptions in 2014, investigators said. They grossed $20 million between 2012 & a raid in 2015, prosecutors said.

Kahn was convicted of conspiracy to unlawfully distribute & dispense controlled substances resulting in death, including oxycodone, an opioid pain reliever, & fentanyl, a synthetic opioid.

Jessica Burch, of Lake Havasu City, Arizona, was a patient of Kahn’s who died from an overdose in 2015.

He wrote nearly 15,000 prescriptions for controlled substances between 2011 & the end of 2016, totaling nearly 2.2 million pills & of which nearly half were oxycodone, prosecutors said.

In their appeals, both doctors said they acted within professional norms & that they were prevented from mounting a good faith defense that they did not intend any harm to patients.

The Justice Department said in Ruan’s case that there was overwhelming evidence that Ruan & his partner acted as a large-scale pusher not as a physician.

(Only the headline and picture of this report may have been reworked by the LatestLaws staff; the rest of the content is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.)

Source Link