US Supreme Court sides with doctors challenging opioid convictions
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The Supreme Court ruled in favor of two doctors convicted of prescribing dangerous opioids without valid medical justification.
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US Supreme Court sides with doctors challenging opioid convictions.
The US Supreme Court on Monday granted a second chance to two doctors convicted of abusing their licenses during the US opioid epidemic to write thousands of prescriptions for addictive pain medications.
The justices ruled 9-0 in favor of Xiulu Ruan and Shakeel Kahn, who argued in an appeal that their trials were unfair because jurors were not required to consider whether the two doctors had "good faith" reasons to believe their numerous opioid prescriptions were medically valid.
In a dissenting opinion, liberal Justice Stephen Breyer stated that once defendants produce evidence that they were authorized to dispense controlled substances such as opioids, prosecutors must prove they knew they were acting illegally.
The justices remanded the two cases to federal appeals courts that had previously upheld their convictions for further proceedings, in which prosecutors may argue that any errors in their jury instructions were harmless.
US Opioid epidemic
For more than two decades, the United States has struggled with an opioid epidemic that, according to federal health officials, has claimed the lives of more than 500,000 Americans.
The US have sued drug companies and pharmacies to hold them accountable, but the role of doctors in prescribing massive amounts of highly addictive pain medication has been a key component in the public health crisis.
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Some doctors have been accused of running "pill mills," or routinely prescribing controlled substances without a medical necessity and outside the bounds of normal professional practice.
Lower courts have disagreed on the standard by which doctors can be convicted of violating the Controlled Substances Act, which regulates a variety of substances including painkillers like opioids, for writing prescriptions outside the scope of professional practice.
Health criminals
In separate criminal cases, Ruan, who practiced in Alabama, and Kahn, who practiced in Arizona and then Wyoming, were sentenced to 21 and 25 years in prison, respectively.
Prosecutors allege that from 2011 to 2015, Ruan and a business partner ran a clinic in Mobile that issued nearly 300,000 controlled-substance prescriptions and was one of the top US prescribers of certain fentanyl-based pain medications.
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They also claim he took kickbacks from drugmaker Insys Therapeutics Inc in exchange for prescribing fentanyl spray to patients. John Kapoor, the founder of Insys, was later convicted of conspiring to bribe doctors, including Ruan, to prescribe the drug and defraud insurers into paying for it.
According to prosecutors, Kahn routinely sold prescriptions for cash and illegally prescribed large amounts of opioid pills, resulting in at least one patient dying of an overdose.
Read next: Overdose Deaths in US Hit Record High during Pandemic
