Category:

...officers cannot explain how the medicine outlet in Kowloon became a victim of clearance operation..Store manager harmed by the chemical irritant, which engulfed Ming Yan Dispensary on Sunday...Police have apologised for firing tear gas into a pharmacy and restaurant in Hong Kong during a protest...READ MORE

Fourteen doctors and other medical professionals were among those charged in fraud schemes that totaled $258 million in California, Oregon and Arizona...Charges were brought...against 34 people for alleged Medicare and Medicaid fraud…The charges targeted schemes billing Medicare and Medicaid for services, testing, and prescriptions that were not medically necessary or not actually provided to beneficiaries...READ MORE

With Purdue Pharma agreeing to settle with dozens of cities and states for a record-setting $12 billion, more opioid settlements could be on the way. But Purdue's agreement doesn't mean all the defendants are willing to go to the negotiating table quietly…Defendants in a Cleveland multidistrict litigation have gone so far as to attack the judge in charge of the case. In a...motion, retailers and distributors—but no drugmakers—demanded the removal of Judge Dan Polster for pushing a settlement. The absence of a pharma company there could show opioid makers are looking for deals rather than continuing to spar it out...READ MORE

The state of Florida is partnering with the Military Health System to share prescription drug data to help providers in the state combat the risk of prescription drug misuse and abuse among the military population...the MHS prescription drug monitoring program began sharing the prescription drug data and analytics with 39 databases throughout the U.S., with the goal of enabling data-sharing among all 54 PDMPs across the country...Healthcare providers in Florida now have access to controlled substance prescription data from military health providers and facilities...READ MORE

A Virginia doctor convicted in May of illegally prescribing more than half a million opioid tablets was sentenced...to 40 years in a federal prison...Joel Smithers, who was convicted of 859 counts of illegally prescribing drugs... was sentenced to 480 months in prison in US District Court for the Western District of Virginia in Abingdon, where he was also given a supervised release of three years and ordered to pay a special assessment of $86,000...READ MORE

Fifty-eight people have been charged with engaging in healthcare fraud schemes that centered on the illegal distribution of more than 6 million opioid pills across Texas...Some 16 medical professionals, including six doctors and seven pharmacists, were charged in the schemes, which featured one pharmacy in Houston that illegally dispensed more than 760,000 pills from March 2018 to September 2019…The schemes in Texas entailed Medicare fraud that resulted in more than $66 million in losses...They also included $158 million in fraudulent claims for compound creams and $23 million in tax evasion...Federal authorities have frozen $60 million in assets of the people accused...READ MORE

The U.S. Department of Justice examined using fentanyl in lethal injections as it prepared last year to resume executing condemned prisoners…The department revealed it had contemplated using the drug in a court filing last month, which has not been previously reported...In the end, it decided against adopting the drug for executions. Attorney General William Barr announced...his department instead would use pentobarbital...when it resumes federal executions later this year, ending a de facto moratorium on the punishment…READ MORE

The U.S. Food and Drug Administration and the Drug Enforcement Administration jointly issued warning letters to four online networks for illegally marketing unapproved and misbranded versions of opioid medicines, the agencies said...The networks which were issued the warning letters...are Divyata, Euphoria Healthcare Pvt Ltd, JCM Dropship and Meds4U, which operate a total of 10 websites...The networks also violated the Controlled Substances Act by not registering the online pharmacies with the DEA despite advertising for the sale of opioids...READ MORE

Four people have been charged in a $99 million pharmacy fraud scheme...the defunct New York and New Jersey pharmacy group Prime Aid Pharmacies had been charged in a scheme that involved paying kickbacks to physicians and falsifying documents to fraudulently bill for medications that were not dispensed to patients...Prime Aid was able to secure network agreements with several pharmacy benefit managers that allowed it to earn reimbursements from both federal and private payers... Prime Aid also bribed physicians by paying an employee to work in the doctors' offices...the company received $65 million in reimbursements for drugs that they not only failed to provide to patients but that they never stocked or ordered...READ MORE

The Trump administration issued a new rule that aims to prevent payments to Medicare and Medicaid fraudsters by boosting revocation powers and extending the time before troublesome organizations can rejoin the programs...The Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services said that the final rule...marks a major turnaround from the agency’s normal approach of attempting to recoup fraudulent payments after the fact...“For too many years, we have played an expensive and inefficient game of ‘whack-a-mole’ with criminals⁠—going after them one at a time⁠—as they steal from our programs,”...READ MORE