Pennsylvania License Defense Blog

As the opioid epidemic continues to garner national attention, authorities are taking heightened actions against doctors they deem to be at fault. Medical professionals who operate “pill mills”—practices that dispense or prescribe narcotics inappropriately—can face steep repercussions. The revocation of one’s license, heavy fines and jail time are all on the table for those that investigators find to be working illegally.

One such doctor in Northumberland County has been issued an indictment from a grand jury for running an alleged pill mill. The 60-year-old physician faces 19 criminal charges for illegally prescribing drugs. The indictment claims that the man has been wrongfully dispensing narcotics since at least 2005. Authorities allege that between January of 2016 and July of 2017 alone the man prescribed 2.7 million pills of Oxycodone, Hydrocodone and Fentanyl to less than 3,000 patients, making him the largest single prescriber of those drugs in the state of Pennsylvania.

Medical marijuana has the potential to create huge licensing issues for physicians and all other health care practitioners.  On May 17, 2018 what was a temporary regulation became a final annual regulation that targets medical doctors for discipline. Identified at 28 PA. Code § 1181.25, any physician identified in the Medical Marijuana Practitioner Registry will now be subject Department of Health annual reviews. Mandatory Arrest Reporting Responsibility The review will seek to determine if the physician's license is inactive, expired, suspended, revoked, limited or otherwise restricted by the applicable medical board, or if the physician has been subject to professional disciplinary action.  This insures that every medical marijuanna "Medical Practitioner" must report to the Medical Board and the Department of Health both upon arrest and annually, any arrests and/or pending disciplinary action.

In April 2018 a Pennsylvania appellate court issued a decision in Abruzzese v BPOA, --- A.3d --- (2018). This case is one of three Spring 2018 cases reversing a Pennsylvania licensing board arbitrary disciplinary decision. I've written about the other two cases,  .

Headline reads "Nurse to be Criminally Charged with 3rd Degree Manslaughter." This byline characterizes the extreme enforcement environment in which all medical practitioners are currently practicing.