Three doctors who helped fuel drug abuse in southeastern Kentucky sentenced to prison
Three doctors convicted of prescribing drugs that fed abuse and addiction in southeastern Kentucky have been sentenced to serve time in federal prison.
Evann Herrell was sentenced to 10 years, Mark Grenkoski to nine years and Stephen Cirelli to four years, according to court records.
A jury convicted the three on charges that included conspiracy to illegally distribute drugs, money laundering and conspiring to falsify medical records.
U.S. District Judge Gregory F. Van Tatenhove sentenced Grenkoski and Herrell on May 8 and Cirelli on May 9 in federal court in Frankfort.
The federal government said in a document seeking financial judgments that Harrell grossed $3.7 million from criminal activity from Herrell; Grenkoski took in $2.3 million; and Cirelli received $903,425.
The three doctors worked at a business in Tennessee called EHC Medical, which had offices in Harriman and Jacksboro and claimed to provide treatment for opioid use disorder.
EHC Medical provided clients with buprenorphine, often called Suboxone. It is a legal drug used in treating addiction to opioid painkillers because it blocks withdrawal symptoms, but can also be abused to self-medicate against withdrawal or to get high.
In reality, EHC Medical operated “not as a legitimate addiction clinic but as a machine to maximize profits without regard to the medical needs of each patient,” federal prosecutors said in a sentencing memorandum.
Doctors at the offices prescribed buprenorphine and other substances, including Xanax, with little examination and wrote prescriptions to people who failed drug screens or showed other signs that they were abusing or diverting the drugs, prosecutors said.
The clinics gained a reputation as places where it was easy to get drugs. People from southeastern Kentucky went to EHC Medical by the carload. Two Kentucky drug dealers acknowledged in guilty pleas that they used EHC as a source for drugs, paying for people to get prescriptions there and then turn over the drugs to the dealers.
Herrell, Grenkoski and Cirelli “effectively became suppliers of diverted buprenorphine and other controlled substances” in southeastern Kentucky, prosecutors said in the sentencing memo.
EHC Medical charged patients cash for office visits, but Medicare and Kentucky Medicaid paid out more than $25 million for drug tests that doctors ordered and to fill prescriptions they wrote for Kentucky residents, according to prosecutors.
A grand jury indicted a total of eight doctors and an office manager who worked at EHC Medical.
Robert Taylor, a doctor who founded the business in 2013 and operated it through late 2018, pleaded guilty to a drug trafficking conspiracy charge.
Van Tatenhove sentenced him to 30 months in prison and a $200,000 fine. Taylor also forfeited $13.8 million to the government.
Physicians Matthew Rasberry, Helen Bidawid and Eva Misra and office manager Lori Barnett pleaded guilty.
Another doctor, Keri McFarlane, was convicted at trial with Herrell, Grenkoski and Cirelli. She has not been sentenced.
