Doctor gets 40 years in opioid prescription case. He gave drugs to every patient, feds say
A Virginia doctor who federal prosecutors saidillegally prescribed more than half a million opioidpills in two years was sentenced to 40 years in prison.
Joel Smithers, 36, was sentenced Wednesday in the U.S. District Court for the Western District of Virginia in Abingdon. Smithers must pay an $86,000 fine, but his sentence is lighter than it could have been.He faced a maximum sentence of life in prison and a fine of more than $200 million, according to a news release from the U.S. Department of Justice.
Smithers prescribed controlled substances including oxymorphone, oxycodone, hydromorphone and fentanyl to every patient at his practice in Martinsville, Virginia, the U.S. Drug Enforcement Agencysaid in a news release.
To get drugs from Smithers, many patients traveled "hundreds of miles, one-way," waitedas long as 12 hours and slept in the parking lot of his office, prosecutors said.
Authorities said the office Smithers opened in 2015 lacked basic medical supplies and had a back room that the receptionist lived in during the workweek. Smithers did not accept insurance and instead took in more than $700,000 in cash and credit payment, according to the DEA.
"Dr. Smithers flooded Virginia, West Virginia, Kentuckyand Ohio with his opioid prescriptions and hid behind his white doctors coat as a large-scale drug dealer,Jesse Fong, special agent in charge of the Washington Division Office, said in a statement.
During his trial, Smithers testifiedhe had been flooded with patients from other states who said many nearby pain clinics had been shut down.
He saidsome of his patients deceived him.I learned several lessons the hard way about trusting people that I should not have trusted, he said.
Smithers was convicted in May of more than 800 counts of illegally prescribing controlled substances, as well as one count of maintaining a place for the purpose of illegally distributing controlled substances andone count of possession with the intent to distribute.
In one case, the jury found the opioids Smithers prescribed to a West Virginia woman caused her death.
More than 700,000 people in the USAdied froma drug overdose from1999 to2017, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, and of those deaths, nearly 68% involved a prescription or illicit opioid.
U.S. Attorney Thomas Cullen said thissentence, though severe, serves as just punishment for Smithers actions.
This physician perpetuated, on a massive scale, the vicious cycle of addiction and despair, Cullen said in a statement.
Contributing: The Associated Press
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This article originally appeared on USA TODAY: Doctor who prescribed 500,000 opioid pills faces 40 years in prison
