Five Manhattan Doctors Indicted For Accepting Bribes And Kickbacks (re Fentanyl prescriptions)

[nitpicker]

https://www.justice.gov/usao-sdny/pr/five-manhattan-doctors-indicted-accepting-bribes-and-kickbacks-pharmaceutical-company

Department of Justice
U.S. Attorney’s Office
Southern District of New York

FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE
Friday, March 16, 2018

Five Manhattan Doctors Indicted For Accepting Bribes And Kickbacks From A Pharmaceutical Company In Exchange For Prescribing Powerful Fentanyl Narcotic

Two Former Pharmaceutical Company Employees Have Also Pled Guilty and Are Cooperating with the Government

Geoffrey S. Berman, the United States Attorney for the Southern District of New York, and William F. Sweeney Jr., the Assistant Director-in-Charge of the New York Field Office of the Federal Bureau of Investigation (“FBI”), announced the unsealing today of an Indictment in Manhattan federal court charging five Manhattan doctors, GORDON FREEDMAN, JEFFREY GOLDSTEIN, TODD SCHLIFSTEIN, DIALECTI VOUDOURIS, and ALEXANDRU BURDUCEA, with participating in a scheme to receive bribes and kickbacks in the form of fees for sham educational programs (“Speaker Programs”) from a pharmaceutical company (“Pharma Company-1”) in exchange for prescribing millions of dollars’ worth of a potent fentanyl-based spray manufactured by Pharma Company-1 (the “Fentanyl Spray”), among other offenses. FREEDMAN, GOLDSTEIN, SCHLIFSTEIN, VOUDOURIS, and BURDUCEA were arrested this morning. All are expected to be presented before U.S. Magistrate Judge Sarah Netburn in Manhattan this afternoon.

Also unsealed today were the guilty pleas of two former Pharma Company-1 employees, Jonathan Roper and Fernando Serrano, in connection with their participation in the bribery and kickback scheme. Both Roper and Serrano are cooperating with the Government.
(snip)

The Fentanyl Spray, which is manufactured by Pharma Company-1, is a powerful painkiller that is approximately 50 to 100 times more potent than morphine. The FDA approved the Fentanyl Spray only for the management of breakthrough pain in cancer patients. Prescriptions of the Fentanyl Spray typically cost thousands of dollars each month, and Medicare and Medicaid, as well as commercial insurers, reimbursed prescriptions written by the defendants.

Pharma Company-1 launched a “Speakers Bureau” in or about August 2012. While the Speakers Bureau was purportedly aimed at educating other practitioners about the Fentanyl Spray, in reality Pharma Company-1 used its Speakers Bureau to induce the doctors to prescribe large volumes of the Fentanyl Spray by paying them Speaker Program fees.

Speakers were supposed to conduct a slide presentation for other health care practitioners regarding the Fentanyl Spray at each Speaker Program. In reality, many of the Speaker Programs led by the defendants were predominantly social affairs where no educational presentation about the Fentanyl Spray occurred. Attendance sign-in sheets for the Speaker Programs were frequently forged by adding the names and signatures of health care practitioners who had not actually been present.

FREEDMAN was a doctor certified in pain management and anesthesiology who owned a private pain management office on Manhattan’s Upper East Side. FREEDMAN, who was also an Associate Clinical Professor at a large hospital in Manhattan (“Hospital-1”), received approximately $308,600 in Speaker Program fees from Pharma Company-1 in exchange for prescribing large volumes of the Fentanyl Spray.

In March 2013, a Regional Sales Manager for Pharma Company-1 sent an email to FREEDMAN informing him that he would receive more Speaker Programs in the coming months because Pharma Company-1 wanted prescriptions of the Fentanyl Spray to increase, and urging FREEDMAN to put more patients on the Fentanyl Spray. FREEDMAN responded, in part, “Got it,” and significantly increased his Fentanyl Spray prescriptions in the following months, during which he received approximately $33,600 in Speaker Program fees.

In 2014, FREEDMAN’s prescriptions of the Fentanyl Spray rose even further, and he was the fourth-highest prescriber of the Fentanyl Spray nationally in the final quarter of 2014, accounting for approximately $1,132,287 in overall net sales of the Fentanyl Spray in that quarter. During 2014, FREEDMAN was the highest-paid Pharma Company-1 Speaker in the nation, receiving approximately $143,000.
(snip)
(more on the other quacks)

[Upthevibe]

1. IMHO this borders on if not actually is

EVIL....Think of the lives these people ruined!

[lamp_shade]

2. For all intents and purposes they're effing drug dealers...

I hope they spend many years in prison. That's if they're lucky. Trump would have them shot.