Following a 15-month investigation into what the Drug Enforcement Administration is calling its largest operation against illegal trafficking of prescription drugs, DEA agents arrested seven physicians and 41 others Wednesday in Alabama, Arkansas, Louisiana and Mississippi, according to the New York Times.
The DEA's investigation focused on the illegal sale and distribution of painkillers, such as hydrocodone, oxycodone and the tranquilizer Xanax. The latest arrests add to the 230 others made over the course of the investigation, which include physicians, pharmacists, street drug dealers and others. Wednesday's raid involved the arrests of two physicians who ran two pain clinics and owned a pharmacy. The two were charged with dispensing controlled substances outside of the usual course of medical practice, as well as healthcare fraud, according to the report.
In Little Rock, Ark., the DEA raided a pain clinic that had been dealing hundreds of prescriptions per day without proper medical examinations. One Arkansas pharmacist used fake prescriptions to sell $500,000 worth of hydrocodone pills — approximately 93,000 pills — in 2013, according to the report.
Keith Brown, the DEA agent in charge of the New Orleans division, said dozens of physicians were forced to surrender their DEA licenses to prescribe controlled substances throughout the duration of the investigation. According to Mr. Brown, undercover agents who made appointments with the physicians in question were able to pay a fee for a prescription without a medical test to verify potential causes of pain. "If you said, 'My elbow hurts,' they didn't touch you. There was no X-ray. You just paid your fee for the prescription," he told the Times.
Some videos even caught physicians "coaxing patients into saying their pain is worse than it is, so they can write it on the chart," according to the report.
Local pharmacists helped the DEA identify specific physicians during the investigation, as well as information from the states' online prescription drug monitoring program, according to Mr. Brown.