Authorities arrested a doctor who allegedly flooded the streets of New Jersey with high dosage painkillers in a scheme potentially worth up to $7 million.
State Attorney General Christopher Porrino announced the bust at a press conference Wednesday in Newark, which included the arrest of 16 alleged leaders of the illicit operation. Dr. Craig Gialanella, a 53-year old internist with a practice in Belleville, N.J., is charged with running the drug ring, which distributed roughly 50,000 oxycodone 30-milligram pills between Jan. 1 and Dec. 7, 2017, reports Fox News.
Gialanella wrote prescriptions in the names of roughly 30 people living in Atlantic County, including the 16 members charged in connection to the scheme, which they would pay for with cash. The members than sold the pills on the streets, feeding opioid addiction in the state. Gialanella is believed to have written scripts for more than 350,000 oxycodone pills in total worth up to $7 million if sold on the street.
“Doctors who act like drug dealers and illegally dole out prescriptions for these highly addictive painkillers are nothing more than drug pushers in white coats, and they are even more dangerous than a street dealer, because we trust that our doctors will protect our health and not hurt or kill us” Porrino said Wednesday, according to Fox News. “Rather than preserving health and protecting life, this doctor allegedly profited by prescribing addiction and death in one of the counties hardest hit by the epidemic of opiate addiction in New Jersey.”
Gialanella is charged with second-degree distribution of narcotics, which is punishable by up to 10 years in prison. He is the sixth doctor in New Jersey to be charged for illegal painkiller distribution over the past two years.
George Beecher, a doctor in Somerset County, was found cashing in on the opioid epidemic with his associates by writing scripts for large quantities of oxycodone to patients he never met or evaluated.
In total, Beecher wrote prescriptions for roughly 60,000 tablets of oxycodone to more than 24 patients he never came into contact with. David Delmonaco, the father of a 21-year-old U.S. Army officer who committed suicide after getting addicted to oxycodone through Beecher, said the doctor “did it all for money.”
GOP Gov. Chris Christie declared the opioid epidemic a public health crisis Jan. 17 in New Jersey, which has a death rate from heroin higher than the national average. There are roughly 128,000 heroin addicts in the state and health experts fear that number is likely growing. Heroin deaths spiked 22 percent between 2014 and 2015 and the state doubled the national drug overdose death rate with 1,600 fatalities in 2015.
An inspector general report released July 6 by the Department of Health and Human Services shows overprescribing of painkillers and doctor shopping by patients continues to cause problems in states throughout the country. 401 medical prescribers were found to be enabling doctor shopping patients by issuing massive doses of opioids to bill to Medicare.
Drug overdoses kill one person every 11 minutes in the U.S. and are now the leading cause of accidental death for Americans under 50.
The New York Times recently culled through data from state health departments and county medical examiners and coroners, predicting there were between 59,000 and 65,000 drug deaths in 2016.
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