Dozens arrested for running alleged Houston 'pill mill'

Aug. 29 (UPI) -- Police arrested dozens of doctors, pharmacists, medical professionals and drug dealers Wednesday for operating a so-called pill mill from the Houston area, the Department of Justice said.

Prosecutors charged 41 people in nine indictments for running a network that included several Houston-based pharmacies to illegally traffic tens of millions of opioid pills throughout the country.

According to the complaints, people posing as patients in pain who had obtained perceptions by "whatever means necessary" would pay Houston pharmacies participating in the conspiracy hundreds of dollars for oxycodone, hydrocodone and other controlled substances to then give the drug to dealers who would sell them on streets as far from Texas as Boston.

The pharmacies "dispensed these drugs in dangerous combinations, often along with promethazine with codeine, because they had high street value," one of the complaints said. The defendants knew these highly dangerous and addictive combinations of drugs, referred to as the "Houston cocktail," were prescribed illegally for money that greatly exceeded the medications' market value.

One pharmacy in the alleged pill mill dispensed Texas's second most number of oxycodone 30mg pills in 2019 and the ninth most in the nation. And every one of those pills was in the highest available dosage, the department of justice said.

Over 23 million pills were diverted for illegal uses through this scheme, prosecutors said.

"This type of criminal activity is, in part, what is fueling the 68,500 overdose deaths per year across the United States," said Special Agent in Charge Will R. Glaspy of the Drug Enforcement Administration. "The DEA and our numerous law enforcement partners will not sit silently while drug dealers wearing lab coats conspire with street dealers to flood our communities with over 23 million dangerous and highly addictive pills."

The suspects were arrested as part of an investigation led by a special healthcare fraud task force, which will be expanded into the Rio Grande Valley and San Antonio, Texas, U.S. Attorney Ryan K. Patrick announced. The task force currently operates in 22 districts.

"By and large, these clinics are all about money and not the patient," Patrick said. "If it was about the patient, no legitimate doctor would write, and no legitimate pharmacy would fill, these massive amounts of combinations of controlled substances. Pill mills are magnets for crime and should be eradicated."

Along with the arrests, the DEA has suspended seven pharmacies and two providers.