Gregory J. Gerber, age 58, of Port Clinton, Ohio, was sentenced to prison after earlier pleading guilty to illegally dispensing narcotics to patients. He was sentenced to 42 months imprisonment to be followed by one year of home confinement for the first of 3 years of supervised release. He was also ordered to pay a $100 special assessment and restitution in the amount of $861,892.13. According to testimony and court records, from January 2010 to August 2018, Gerber repeatedly prescribed controlled substances outside the usual course of professional practice and not for a legitimate medical purpose, including powerful painkillers such as fentanyl, oxycodone, oxymorphone and other drugs. Gerber distributed narcotics that were not medically necessary by writing controlled substance prescriptions without first performing adequate patient physical examinations. He also used faulty diagnoses to prescribe excessive doses of controlled substances for long periods of time without evidence that the controlled substances were helping the patients, all while ignoring signs of addiction and drug abuse among those patients.
Gerber also profited significantly from prescribing Subsys, a particular branded formulation of fentanyl manufactured by Insys Therapeutics, Inc. Between 2013 and 2016, Gerber received $175,000 from Insys for promoting the drug through Insys’s speaker’s bureau program. During that same time, Gerber wrote 835 prescriptions for Subsys.
