A Doctor Who Prescribed 500,000 Doses of Opioids Is Sent to Prison for 40 Years

[Yo_Mama_Been_Loggin]

A Virginia doctor who prescribed more than 500,000 doses of opioids in two years was sentenced to 40 years in prison on Wednesday for leading what prosecutors called an interstate drug distribution ring.

The overprescription of painkillers is one of the roots of the nation’s opioid crisis, and patients of Dr. Joel Smithers traveled hundreds of miles from neighboring states to pick up oxymorphone, oxycodone, hydromorphone and fentanyl, according to law enforcement officials. They said he prescribed controlled substances to every patient in the Martinsville, Va., practice he opened in August 2015.

Dr. Smithers, 36, was convicted of more than 800 counts of illegally prescribing opioids, and jurors found that the drugs he prescribed caused the death of a woman from West Virginia. He faced a maximum sentence of life in prison.

Dr. Smithers flooded a region with opioid prescriptions and “hid behind his white doctor’s coat as a large-scale drug dealer,” Jesse Fong, special agent in charge of the Washington division of the Drug Enforcement Administration, said in a statement on Wednesday.

https://www.msn.com/en-us/news/us/a-doctor-who-prescribed-500000-doses-of-opioids-is-sent-to-prison-for-40-years/ar-AAIcjfx?li=BBnb7Kz

[Aristus]

1. Good. Get the quacks out of the profession, so the rest of us can offer appropriate care

for our patients.

[Dave Starsky]

3. The days of handing out meds to appease patients are at an end.

Whether it be antibiotics, opioids, or whatever.

Health care providers always put the concerns and desires of their patients first. Some of those desires may not objectively be in the best interest of the patient. It seems to me that there is a greater awareness now among health care providers to impart this information to their patients--that maybe they should start out with a non-refillable ten pain pills for their post-surgical pain instead of a refillable 30.

[fescuerescue]

2. I love how they inflate the numbers in the headline

It reminds me of Daryl on the office who put on his resume that he managed "5 billion units of inventory" on his resume.

The 5 billion units? Sheets of paper.

FWIW, I'm fine with regulating doctors and insuring that opioids aren't over prescribed. But the hysteria is causing real people with real pain to go untreated and many to seek street drugs for the pain.

This doctor made 800 illegal prescriptions and one woman died. Terrible. But calling it "500,000 does" is just feeding hysteria that hurts other people.

Our war on drugs make people die.

[Hekate]

4. Way to misread the article. The doc was convicted on 800 counts. However, the documented ...

...the documented number of doses sold was half a million. Why would you want to minimize the harm that caused? Tens of thousands of human beings have died in this epidemic.

The Sackler family belongs in prison, as do others like this doctor who knowingingly profited off the misery and death that came with being dope pushers.

There's an old old song that goes: "God damn the pusher man." Amen.

[fescuerescue]

6. I covered that in my post

800 counts. Exactly. That's a better headline.

I also want to minimize the harm of the thousands and thousands that can't get pain medication, and the hundreds that turn to street drugs for relief and died.

I never said this doc shouldn't be punished. (way to misread my post).

If you want to talk about the Sackler family. That's fine we can do that, but that's different post and different state and different headline.

500,000 doses. Come on. Sensationalist journalism just erodes the message. if you read my posting carefully, you'll come to understand that I didn't take the punishment to task, I took the reporting and hysteria to task. Hysteria that is killing people.

[Hekate]

5. That's what I'd call a good start