New Report Exposes Corrupt Doctors Involved In Drug Trade

Scheming entrepreneurs and corrupt physicians, some with ties to organized crime, are running illicit medical practices in New Jersey.

That’s according to a new report released this morning by the State Commission of Investigation (SCI) detailing the latest findings of a comprehensive probe into prescription pill and heroin abuse in New Jersey.

“Some medical management companies with names that incorporate benign terms like ‘pain management’ and ‘wellness’ have transformed street‐corner drug-dealing into an orderly and seemingly ordinary business endeavor,” the SCI report states. “Even as law enforcement authorities, public‐health officials, social workers, treatment counselors, schools and families redouble their efforts to combat the purveyors and consequences of this predatory scourge, it continues to evolve in ways that few could have imagined when the so‐called war on drugs was launched more than four decades ago.”

In one scheme, homeless Medicaid recipients and drug addicts in downtown Newark were regularly transported by van to a strip‐mall “medical center” where they were given unnecessary prescriptions for powerful painkillers as part of a ploy to bilk government health insurance.

In another scam, a chiropractic office operating out of a seemingly abandoned building in Camden was home to a painkiller‐prescription emporium that resulted in the distribution hundreds of thousands of addictive pain pills – including, during one 19‐month period, the equivalent of nearly 10 kilograms of the painkilling drug Oxycodone with a street value estimated at nearly $10 million.

The SCI has referred its findings to the Office of the Attorney General, the New Jersey Division of Consumer Affairs, the Office of the United States Attorney for the District of New Jersey, the State Board of Medical Examiners and the Office of the County Prosecutors in each of the state’s 21 counties.