Scores of individuals were indicted during the first Trump administration for their involvement in a network of “pill mill” clinics — operations that diverted millions of oxycodone, hydrocodone, and carisoprodol pills with the help of health care professionals evidently eager to endanger public health to make a quick buck.
The current administration, which has significantly ramped up its fraud crackdown, has delivered one of the participants in this scheme to justice.
The Justice Department revealed in an exclusive to Blaze News on Monday that three days earlier, a federal jury in the Southern District of Texas convicted Barbara Marino — a 65-year-old resident of Tomball who served as the sole prescribing physician at Angels Clinica in Houston — of one count of conspiracy to distribute a controlled substance and four counts of distributing a controlled substance.
Marino faces more than 20 years in prison for each of the five counts.
“Medical physicians who exploit their prescribing authority for profit over patient care break an inherent trust with their patients, and we will hold them accountable,” said Assistant Attorney General Colin McDonald of the DOJ’s National Fraud Enforcement Division in a statement. “The Department of Justice remains committed to protecting the public from dangerous and unlawful distribution of controlled substances, especially when the drug dealer is a doctor.”
Marino, who was first licensed to practice medicine in the Lone Star State in 1990, was found to have unlawfully distributed over 1 million pills of opioids and other controlled substances through the strip-mall clinic in Houston where her practice was based.
Angels Clinica in Houston has since permanently closed. Angels Medical, which is linked to the now-defunct Houston clinic, did not immediately respond to Blaze News’ request for comment.
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The original indictment against Marino said that of the roughly 1.06 million controlled-substance pills for which she issued prescriptions between September 2018 and August 2019, 518,000 were hydrocodone pills, 65,000 were oxycodone pills, and approximately 416,000 were carisoprodol pills.
Many of the purported patients who obtained prescriptions from Marino’s cash-only clinic were effectively drug mules sent her way by traffickers who subsequently peddled the drugs on the street, according to court documents and evidence presented at trial.
This grift proved lucrative.
The Justice Department claimed that Marino — who is supposedly an addiction specialist — received over $400,000 from Angels Clinica’s owners both for writing prescriptions that lacked a legitimate medical purpose and for doing so outside the usual course of professional practice.
Evidence shown at trial suggested that Marino rarely if ever encountered a patient for whom she wouldn’t prescribe dangerous and addictive drugs.
In one instance, she reportedly prescribed what the DOJ characterized as a “dangerous cocktail of hydrocodone and carisoprodol” — apparently one ingredient short of the so-called “Houston Cocktail” — to a pregnant woman in her third trimester. The woman’s OB-GYN testified that the drugs had threatened the well-being of both the mother and her unborn child.
The DOJ highlighted another case exemplifying Marino’s willingness to give practically anyone hard drugs, specifically a mentally compromised patient — a diagnosed bipolar schizophrenic who suffered from the chronic delusion that he was President Richard Nixon — to whom she allegedly prescribed her dangerous cocktail on at least three occasions.
Drug Enforcement Administration Assistant Administrator Cheri Oz, whose agency investigated this case, stated, “Patients put their trust and their lives into the hands of our medical and health care professionals.
“The highly addictive, dangerous misused drugs in this case — oxycodone and hydrocodone — are meant to treat pain, not cause it,” continued Oz. “DEA remains relentless in our pursuit of those who poison our communities and exploit our health care system, all to line their own pockets with the profit from others’ pain.”
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