North Jersey ‘pill mills’ cashing in on painkiller addiction
Saturday, July 27, 2013 Last updated: Sunday July 28, 2013, 9:45 AM
BY REBECCA D. O’BRIEN AND BARBARA WILLIAMS
STAFF WRITERS
The Record
They came by vanloads from downtown Newark. The Medicaid recipients and homeless drug addicts piled into a medical center in a strip mall in Passaic, where they got cursory examinations and bogus diagnoses from a licensed doctor. The patients left with gift cards and prescriptions for narcotic painkillers, investigators said, while Joseph Dituro and his partners got the Medicaid reimbursements.
Physicians, anesthesiologists, oral surgeons and psychiatrists, along with chiropractors, pharmacists and other licensed medical practitioners have been arrested and charged in prescription fraud and pills-for-cash schemes across the state.
Last year, at least 10 of the federal Drug Enforcement Administration’s roughly 30 New Jersey-related busts involved prescription drugs, up from two in 2007.
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