Missouri doctor a felon after giving opioids to three women who lived with him

A Missouri doctor pleaded guilty Wednesday to improperly giving prescription opioids to three women who lived with him.

As of Thursday, Philip Dean was still licensed to practice medicine anywhere in Missouri. But the neurologist, based in Warren County, near St. Louis, now has a Nov. 20 sentencing date and faces up to 15 years in federal prison for convictions of illegally distributing prescription opiates and lying to Medicare about it.

“This is an outrageous violation of the trust our society commits to physicians,” federal prosecutor Jeff Jensen said in a statement released by the U.S. attorney’s office. “Dr. Dean violated that trust and exploited his drug dependent patients. On top of it all, the taxpayers were forced to foot the bill for his crimes.”

Dean was indicted in March after a grand jury found that he had improperly diverted a host of opioid and fentanyl prescriptions to the three women, two of whom he also employed in his medical clinic.

The women are identified in court documents only by their initials. The indictment says one of them had a history of substance abuse problems, but Dean wrote prescriptions in the name of one of her relatives, went to the pharmacy and picked them up, paid the co-pays himself and took the drugs back to her.

One of the drugs he gave her was Subsys, a powerful fentanyl spray that is approved only for breakthrough cancer pain. The woman did not have cancer.

The indictment says Dean exchanged sexual text messages and Facebook messages with one of the other women, identified as “C.H.,” at the same time he was prescribing her controlled substances and that “one of his medical ‘examinations’ of C.H. occurred at a restaurant in Kansas City.”

The Dean case was investigated by law enforcement at the local, state and federal level, including the Warrenton Police Department, the Missouri attorney general’s office’s Medicaid Fraud Control Unit and the Drug Enforcement Administration.

“The Drug Enforcement Administration will continue to pursue these bad actors to bring them to justice,” said William Callahan, the special agent in charge of the DEA’s St. Louis office, which includes all of Missouri and Kansas. “Addiction to opioids is a serious illness and we will not allow doctors to abuse their authority for personal gain.”

This story was originally published August 23, 2018 at 12:16 PM.