South Florida doctor convicted in unlawful prescription scandal

MIAMI, Fla. — A South Florida doctor has been convicted for unlawfully prescribing oxycodone, morphine, alprazolam, and other drugs.

The doctor, Osmin Morales, 72, of Weston, was convicted by a Miami federal court jury of conspiracy to unlawfully dispense and distribute controlled substances and six counts of unlawfully dispensing controlled substances, according to the US Attorney’s Office for the Southern District of Florida (USAO).

The January 12 conviction followed a seven-day trial before U.S. District Judge James I. Cohn.

Under federal law, a physician is authorized to dispense (prescribe) controlled substances only when there is a legitimate medical basis for doing so and the dispensing is consistent with accepted standards of professional medical practice.

According to court documents and evidence introduced at his trial, Morales 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, Morales is said to have issued prescriptions for controlled substances without examining the patients, often when he was not even present in the clinic.

Evidence at his trial revealed that Morales 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 to maximize the clinic’s profits unlawfully.

Some of Morales’s former patients testified during the 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.

According to the USAO, medical records from Morales’s office described several medical examinations he 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 1,000 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.

A pain medicine expert witness testified that none of the patient medical records he had examined contained any proper medical basis for the use of opioids, such as oxycodone or morphine, nor any basis for the use of benzodiazepines, such as alprazolam.

The pain medicine expert also testified that the combination of opioids and benzodiazepines that Morales regularly prescribed, both of which are central nervous system depressants, created an enhanced risk of overdose and death.

A former member of Morales’s office staff testified that she had collected approximately $4,000 per day in cash from patients to whom Morales provided controlled substance prescriptions. On most of those days, Morales had not been present at the clinic.

Morales is scheduled to be sentenced on April 17. He faces up to 20 years in prison for the conspiracy count and the same for each of the additional counts of unlawful dispensing.

U.S. Attorney Markenzy Lapointe for the Southern District of Florida and Special Agent in Charge Deanne L. Reuter of the DEA, Miami Field Division, announced the conviction.

DEA Miami Field Division investigated the case with assistance from CBP. Assistant U.S. Attorneys Frank Tamen and Theodore Joseph O’Brien are prosecuting the case.  Assistant U.S. Attorneys Emily Stone and Mitchell Hyman are handling asset forfeiture.