(HP) – Ethel Johnson couldn’t get her prescription for pain medication filled fast enough. The 60-year-old Buffalo woman was hurting – but investigators say that wasn’t the reason for the rush.
According to secretly recorded telephone conversations, the sooner Johnson could pick up her pills, the more quickly she could sell them to her dealer. Her pain pills were destined for the street.
Johnson is among 33 people charged so far in a large-scale investigation that has opened a window into an emerging class of suppliers in the illicit drug trade: medical patients, including many who rely on the publicly funded Medicaid program to pay for their appointments and prescriptions. She has pleaded not guilty.
For the first time, the Buffalo investigators devoted the kinds of resources normally aimed at street drugs like heroin or crack – wiretaps, buys, surveillance and cross-agency cooperation to trace the drugs from pharmacy to street. Even they were taken aback by the burgeoning market for the kinds of pills found in medicine cabinets in typical American homes.
“I have to admit we were sort of surprised at how big this had become,” said Charles Tomaszewski, former supervisor of the DEA office. “The suburbs, the city, there was no area that wasn’t touched by this.”
Often at no charge, the patients see a doctor, or several doctors, and come away with prescriptions for narcotic OxyContin and other pills they then sell to a dealer for as much as $1,000. If they are on Medicaid, the program is billed about $1,060 for a typical 60-pill, 80-mg prescription, along with the $23-to-$39 cost of the doctor’s visit.
“These patients, in essence, become the source for the drugs,” said Dale Kasprzyk, acting head of the Drug Enforcement Administration in Buffalo.
“This is a lucrative underground business for people,” he said.
A report last year by the Government Accountability Office estimated that 65,000 Medicaid beneficiaries in New York and four other states had visited six or more doctors in fiscal 2006 and 2007 to acquire duplicate prescriptions for controlled substances.
