On Jan. 12, a Miami federal court jury convicted a doctor of conspiracy to unlawfully dispense and distribute controlled substances, and six counts of unlawfully dispensing controlled substances. According to court documents and evidence introduced at trial, Osmin Morales, 72, of Weston, Florida, established a purported pain management clinic in which he issued prescriptions for controlled substances, principally oxycodone, morphine, and alprazolam (a tranquilizer commonly known by its brand name, Xanax) to most patients who sought them, without any appropriate medical basis. On many occasions, Doctor Morales issued prescriptions for controlled substances without examining the patients, often when he was not even present in the clinic. Morales also often pre-wrote many prescriptions for controlled substances and provided them to his office managers to hand out for cash payments of $250 to regular patients, with the purpose of unlawfully maximizing the clinic’s profits.
Some of Morales’s former patients testified during trial that they had often obtained prescriptions for oxycodone, morphine, and alprazolam from the office staff without seeing Morales. One patient’s mother testified that she had begged Morales to stop prescribing narcotics to her daughter, because she was becoming dysfunctional, but he continued prescribing them. Medical records from Morales’s office described a number of medical examinations he had purportedly conducted of patients which described the patients’ symptoms and included Morales’s diagnoses for which he prescribed opioids to them. However, official records from the U.S. Customs and Border Protection (CBP) confirmed that on many of the dates for those purported examinations, Morales had been out of the country. A Drug Enforcement Administration (DEA) agent testified that Florida’s prescription drug monitoring program showed that during the time of the indictment, Morales had prescribed opioids to more than a thousand patients, most often the maximum available doses. The DEA agent also researched numerous patients by name and found that nearly one-third of them had criminal records relating to drug dealing.
