Doctor who fed drug abuse in Kentucky with illegal prescriptions sentenced to prison
A Tennessee doctor who illegally prescribed drugs that fed addiction in southeastern Kentucky has been sentenced to seven years in prison.
James J. Maccarone pleaded guilty to conspiring to illegally distribute drugs.
Maccarone operated Gateway Medical Associates P.C., a clinic in Clarksville, Tenn.
People from the Knox County area in Kentucky, about four hours away from Clarksville, traveled to the clinic to get prescriptions for pain pills that were diverted to illegal sales, according to court records.
Terry L. Prince, a Barbourville man charged with Maccarone, admitted he paid the costs for people to travel to the clinic, see a doctor and fill prescriptions. The people then either gave Prince the drugs to sell or sold them and shared the money with him, he acknowledged in his plea agreement.
That sponsorship arrangement — sending people, many of them addicted to drugs, to shady clinics in other states to get prescriptions — has been common in Kentucky for years.
The time period covered in the indictment in the case was July 2016 to March 2021.
Maccarone admitted he wrote prescriptions for people who showed “obvious signs of drug diversion and abuse.”
Maccarone often saw patients from Kentucky past midnight; prescribed high doses of pain pills to people who waited hours to see him; failed to do proper examinations; and allowed patients to pay an extra fee to avoid pill counts, Assistant U.S. Attorney Andrew E. Smith said in a sentencing memorandum.
Those counts are one way to make sure someone isn’t selling the drugs covered by a prescription.
People received prescriptions at the clinic even though they had tested positive for drugs such as fentanyl and methamphetamine, Smith said.
Running a pill mill
“Maccarone abandoned his responsibility as a physician and profited from running a ‘pill mill’ for several years,” Smith wrote. “In doing so, he served as a significant supplier for diverted medications” in Eastern Kentucky.
The government’s sentencing memo cited a person from Kentucky who died in October 2017 after getting a prescription at Maccarone’s clinic for 150 pain pills and 60 Xanax tablets.
Maccarone agreed as part of his guilty plea to surrender his Tennessee medical license; forfeit the clinic property and $204,186 to the government; and pay the government $1.3 million.
U.S District Judge Robert E. Wier sentenced Maccarone Wednesday in federal court in London.
Prince was sentenced to five years and eight months, and Jeffrey L. Ghent, a Clay County drug dealer who got prescriptions at Maccarone’s clinic and sponsored other people to go there as well, was sentenced to five years.
Ghent’s plea agreement said he sometimes paid more than $400 cash for an office visit, and cited one example in which he received a prescription for pain pills in March 2021 and sold five of them two days later for $100 apiece.
Another doctor at Maccarone’s clinic, John L. Stanton, was convicted in the case but has not been sentenced.
The case against Maccarone was related to one against Calvin Manis, a Barbourville pharmacist who admitted filling prescriptions for drugs that he knew would be sold illegally.
Wier sentenced Manis, who served 28 years on the Barbourville City Council, to eight years and four months in prison.
