A 52-year-old Kensington former doctor was convicted by a federal jury Friday for his role in participating in what federal prosecutors described as a pill mill drug operation.
William Crittenden III, was convicted in U.S. District Court in Baltimore of conspiring to distribute oxycodone and alprazolam and eight counts of unlawfully distributing oxycodone. His sentencing date has not been scheduled.
During an 11-day trial, prosecutors presented evidence that Crittenden worked for four months as the medical director at Healthy Life, a clinic in Baltimore County where the painkillers were distributed. During that time, Crittenden was paid $1,500 per day by the managers of the clinic and received a total of $104,500 while working at the clinic.
Prosecutors said Crittenden knowingly provided prescriptions to individuals who were addicted to the opioid painkillers as well as to people who sold the prescription drugs on the street.
The clinic operated from March 2011 until it closed in May 2012 amid a police drug investigation. However, Crittenden resigned in August 2011 when the Maryland Board of Physicians revoked his medical license after investigating how he was prescribing the drugs.
Crittenden was part of a larger scheme developed by Gerald Wiseberg, an 82-year-old Korean War veteran who first started selling painkillers out of a Florida storefront operation in March 2010, according to prosecutors. That clinic was raided by agents with the Drug Enforcement Agency just two months after Wiseberg opened Healthy Life in Baltimore County, according to court records. Wiseberg and three others pleaded guilty last year for their roles in the scheme and are scheduled to be sentenced in March.
Prosecutors said the Baltimore County operation made 80 percent of its sales to out-of-state customers and that unruly crowds would gather outside the business waiting to purchase painkillers. Prosecutors said clinic workers would refer patients to a cash-only MRI screening service for tests to determine the source of pain as well as conduct urinalysis tests to see if individuals abused other drugs. However, these steps were an attempt to throw off investigators, prosecutors said, and patients who failed the drug tests or whose MRIs showed no signs of injury were prescribed painkillers anyway.
The indictment in Wiseberg’s case noted that Healthy Life prescribed a total of 1.4 million oxycodone pills and made more than $2 million in a little more than a year of operations. Customers were charged $300 in cash for a first appointment and $250 for each subsequent visit, according to the indictment.
