Federal prosecutors are signaling that additional defendants and charges could be added to the case against two Mobile doctors accused of running one of the nation’s largest pill mills, according to a court filing seeking to push the trial back to mid-2016.
The filing, submitted this week in U.S. District Court in Mobile, asked a judge to delay the trial due to what prosecutors described as the likelihood of a superseding indictment that would include additional criminal charges and possibly new co-defendants tried alongside the case’s original two physicians.
The doctors, co-owners of a Mobile pain management practice, were indicted in May on charges of conspiracy to distribute controlled substances outside the usual course of professional medical practice and conspiracy to commit healthcare fraud. Prosecutors allege the clinic operated as one of the most prolific prescribers of opioid painkillers in the country.
According to figures cited in court filings, the clinic’s pharmacy was the top buyer of oxymorphone and fentanyl in Alabama in a recent year, the second-largest buyer of morphine and oxycodone, and the seventh-largest buyer of methadone statewide. In one year, the pharmacy’s oxymorphone and fentanyl purchases outpaced the state’s next-largest buyer by wide margins, and patients reportedly traveled from 18 different states to obtain prescriptions at the clinics.
Court records show one of the physicians wrote nearly 35,000 prescriptions for controlled substances in a single year, a pace investigators calculated at roughly one prescription every three and a half minutes for a standard 40-hour work week, based on an FBI affidavit filed in the case.
A third doctor who worked at the practice was not charged but voluntarily surrendered his controlled-substance prescribing license to the U.S. Drug Enforcement Administration in May. Records show he later applied to have that license reinstated.
Investigators say the case has been complicated by the sheer volume of evidence collected during the federal probe. The FBI copied thousands of pages of medical records from the clinic, but attorneys on both sides have been unable to review the material because they lack compatible software to analyze it. A federal magistrate judge ordered the electronic medical records vendor used by the clinic to produce software capable of processing the records, a step prosecutors say is necessary before the case can move forward.
The delay request underscores the scope and complexity of a prosecution that has drawn national attention to prescribing practices at Mobile-area pain clinics. Federal authorities have not said how many additional defendants, if any, might ultimately be named in a superseding indictment, and the case remains pending as both sides continue reviewing evidence ahead of a revised trial date.