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The bullet wounds that University Medical Center trauma surgeon Dr. Jay Coates saw late Sunday night were to the head, chest, abdomen, legs and arms...“It was like we were in a war zone,” he said early Monday...“From our patients’ wounds, you could tell a high-powered weapon had been used.”...Despite that preparation, UMC medical personnel and others at Sunrise, Valley and St. Rose Dominican hospitals said the carnage...Stephen Paddock unleashed at the...country music festival adjacent to Mandalay Bay was beyond anything you could imagine. Patients arrived so fast that the surgeons and support personnel couldn’t begin to keep up...“It was controlled chaos, a combat medical hospital — blood everyplace,” said Dr. Dale Carrison, head of emergency...staff at UMC...UMC, Southern Nevada’s only Level I trauma center, received 104 patients. Other patients — the final number is still uncertain — were later transferred to the hospital from other medical centers that couldn’t handle the severity of the gunshot wounds...Sunrise Hospital and Medical Center, a Level II trauma center and the closest trauma center to the Strip, treated 214 patients, with at least 30 needing surgery. Fifteen patients died there. The Sunrise system’s other hospitals, Southern Hills and Mountain View, treated nine and eight patients, respectively...Gretchen Papez, a spokeswoman for the Valley Hospital System, said the network of hospitals received a total of 228 patients, eight of whom died. She provided this breakdown by individual hospital: Desert Springs, 105 patients treated; Spring Valley, 53; Henderson, 32; Valley, 29; Summerlin, six; and Centennial Hills, three.

...the Nevada Department of Corrections is preparing to use fentanyl in a three-part drug combination for an upcoming execution....The combination includes the sedative diazepam...the muscle relaxant cisatracurium; and fentanyl...Nevada turned to fentanyl for an execution because the state had no other drugs to carry out a lethal injection after "pharmaceutical industry opposition to the use of their products in executions,"..This fentanyl drug combination is to be used in the execution of 46-year-old Scott Raymond Dozier on November 14 at Ely State Prison in Ely, Nevada...Dozier was sentenced to death after a first-degree murder conviction for the 2002 killing and dismemberment of Jeremiah Miller, 22...The concern is that this specific chemical cocktail that they have proposed has never been used in this way before. It's not like they can point to some success or result. This will be the first time...

The Drug Enforcement Administration...proposed a 20 percent reduction in the manufacture of certain commonly prescribed opioid painkillers as well as other controlled substances for next year...The proposal comes as U.S. regulators and lawmakers take steps to limit the supply of opioids - a class of drugs that include prescription painkillers and heroin - to combat the epidemic of abuse, overdose and addiction...The DEA's proposed production quotas for Schedule I and II substances reflect the amount needed to meet the United States' medical, scientific, industrial, export and reserve requirements...The DEA recommendation comes about two months after the Food and Drug Administration took the rare step of asking a drugmaker (Endo International) to withdraw its opioid painkiller from the market, citing the public health crisis.

Ohio’s Board of Pharmacy began reporting sales of gabapentin prescriptions in its regular monitoring of controlled substances. The drug, which is not an opioid nor designated a controlled substance by federal authorities, is used to treat nerve pain. But the board found that it was the most prescribed medication on its list...surpassing oxycodone by more than 9 million doses. In February, the Ohio Substance Abuse Monitoring Network issued an alert regarding increasing misuse across the state...Gabapentin’s ability to tackle multiple ailments has helped make it one of the most popular medications in the U.S. In May, it was the fifth-most prescribed drug in the nation...law enforcement officials and drug counselors say the addition of gabapentin adds a new obstacle. As providers dole out the drug in mass quantities for conditions such as restless legs syndrome and alcoholism, it is being subverted to a drug of abuse. Gabapentin can enhance the euphoria caused by an opioid and stave off drug withdrawals. In addition, it can bypass the blocking effects of medications used for addiction treatment, enabling patients to get high while in recovery...

Allergan Plc’s decision to pay a Native American tribe $15 million a year rather than let one of its blockbuster drugs be scrutinized by the U.S. Patent & Trademark Office is part of a backlash against an agency review panel that has been dubbed a “death squad.”...The drugmaker earlier this month transferred ownership of patents protecting a medicine with $1.49 billion in sales last year to the Saint Regis Mohawk Tribe of upstate New York. The tribe, which will receive royalties every year, says that as a sovereign entity it is immune from such civil patent challenges....The creative -- and untested -- maneuver is designed to circumvent the Patent Trial and Appeal Board...critics say the board has made it too easy for rivals to attack patents and they’re pressing Congress, the courts and the patent office for changes...companies such as Google or Apple Inc., which are among the biggest users of the review board to fend off what they consider nuisance lawsuits from companies looking for a quick payday...the Supreme Court agreed to take a case to determine if the reviews are constitutional -- critics of the reviews say a patent is a property right that only federal courts can revoke. But even those who want to see the system dismantled say that case is a long shot...The patent office has been considering changes to its procedures...

Arizona sued Insys Therapeutics Inc...accusing the drugmaker of engaging in a fraudulent marketing scheme aimed at increasing sales of a fentanyl-based cancer pain medicine called Subsys...The lawsuit by Arizona Attorney General Mark Brnovich in Maricopa County Superior Court in Phoenix comes during a series of federal and state investigations centered on Insys’ drug Subsys amid a national opioid addiction epidemic...The lawsuit accused Arizona-based Insys of paying doctors sham speaker fees in exchange for writing prescriptions of Subsys and of misleading insurers into believing patients who were prescribed the opioid had cancer when they actually did not...The lawsuit seeks an injunction, restitution for customers and the disgorgement of any illegally earned profits…

A total of 412 people, including almost 115 doctors, nurses and other medical professionals, have been charged in the sweeping enforcement action, the biggest ever by the multi-agency Medicare Strike Force, the Justice Department said...More than 120 people were accused of illegally prescribing and distributing opioids and other dangerous narcotics...Amazingly, some have made their practices into multi-million-dollar criminal enterprises...Those charged participated in schemes that billed Medicaid, Medicare and TRICARE...for unneeded drugs and treatments that were often never provided...In many cases, healthcare providers paid cash kickbacks to patients and others in exchange for medical data that would allow them to file fraudulent bills to Medicare...In addition to the hundreds charged, the Department of Health and Human Services has launched suspension procedures against almost 300 medical service providers, including doctors, nurses and pharmacists...

Shkreli is expected to be locked up...for four months...Martin Shkreli's new home in a Brooklyn, New York, federal jail is definitely not the kind of place "where you want to be,"…Metropolitan Detention Center Brooklyn...Shkreli...was thrown into the MDC...after a Brooklyn federal court judge revoked his $5 million release bond...Judge Kiyo Matsumoto ruled that Shkreli represented a danger to the community because of a bizarre $5,000 bounty he offered to Facebook followers who grabbed samples of Hillary Clinton's hair for him...Shkreli, who previously ran two pharmaceutical companies and several hedge funds...A jury convicted him in August of three securities fraud charges...

The US Food and Drug Administration has stopped a California company from continuing to inject the smallpox vaccine into the tumors of cancer patients...US marshals seized five vials of the smallpox vaccine from San Diego-based StemImmune Inc, which was using them as part of an unproven method for treating tumors...he vaccine is not commercially available and is only reserved for people who are at very high risk for developing smallpox, so it’s not clear how StemImmune got the vials to begin with. Luckily, the vaccine is not made from the actual smallpox virus and cannot give anyone the disease...It was...not meant to be used the way StemImmune was doing so, which was by mixing it with stem cells that come from body fat and injecting it into the tumors of patients at California Stem Cell Treatment Centers in Beverly Hills and Rancho Mirage...The FDA is encouraging consumers who have tried the treatment and had bad effects to use its MedWatch Adverse Event Reporting program.

A Las Vegas doctor who drugged and raped patients was ordered Monday to serve 50 years to life behind bars...District Judge Kathleen Delaney called the case against Binh “Ben” Chung “abhorrent and unfathomable” and “incredibly disturbing” as she handed down the sentence...Chung testified...he had an ongoing consensual affair with one of the women, and that she was awake in the videos jurors watched, playing a role in his “Sleeping Beauty” fantasy...He said he had somnophilia, a fetish for having sex with someone who is unconscious. He also testified that the teenager prosecutors said he molested in another video was actually the woman with whom he claimed he had an affair...Chung, found guilty of 11 counts, including use of a minor in the production of pornography, kidnapping, battery with intent to commit sexual assault, and four counts of sexual assault, thanked the judge and attorneys on both sides, along with his family, but did not apologize...