"Patients" sue "Physicians" and "Pharmacists"

I had the opportunity to review the full court documents and then chat with Stephanie Goldberg as she was putting together this article (https://bit.ly/1JGYJW2) for Business Insurance. If you have about 10 minutes, reading the West Virginia Supreme Court decision at https://bit.ly/1R9QOTc will prove to be informative.

To summarize, "patients" sued "physicians" and "pharmacists" for providing addictive drugs to them. I use the quotes for a reason - none of them are who they say they are. "Patients" admitted to:

• criminal possession of pain medications;
• criminal distribution, purchase, and receipt of pain medications ("off the street");
• criminally acquiring and obtaining narcotics through misrepresentation, fraud, forgery, deception, and subterfuge (not advising doctors of addiction or receipt of narcotics from other doctors);
• criminally obtaining narcotics from multiple doctors concurrently (commonly known as "doctor shopping");
• and abusing and/or misusing pain medication by ingesting greater amounts than prescribed and snorting or injecting the medications to enhance their effects.

Doesn't sound like a patient, but a user/dealer.

But the "physicians" and "pharmacists" didn't live up to their name either, as they were accused of "pill mill" activities by the medical providers acting "in concert" with the pharmacies, who:

• refilled the controlled substances too early
• refilled them for excessive periods of time
• filled contraindicated controlled substances
• and filled "synergistic" controlled substances which would provide an enhancing effect to the drugs.

So ... Both parties were acting illegally, immorally and unethically. Allegedly ... Since this Supreme Court decision is just to allow the lawsuit to proceed as they decided "comparative fault / negligence" was not an excuse to let the "physicians" and "pharmacists" off the hook. Although it is a little more than alleged since the FBI raided the Mountain Medical Center, some of the physicians' medical licenses were revoked, some pled guilty to federal offenses, and one of the pharmacies/pharmacists are subject to disciplinary and/or criminal action.

With all of this background, one obvious question ... Why did the "patients" sue the "physicians" and "pharmacists"? By doing so, their illegal activity was uncovered. I could only think of three reasons:

1. Was it bad intentions to make even more money through settlement of the lawsuit?
2. Was it to remove competition since the “patients” admitted they were involved in criminal distribution of pain medications?
3. Was it good intentions to force these bad physicians/clinics/pharmacies out of business so they couldn’t hurt other people?

My guess ... It wasn't for good intentions. Since they have the go-ahead for the lawsuit, it will be interesting to see who "wins". In my opinion, everyone should lose.