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Joel Smithers established a medical practice in Martinsville from which he developed an illegal prescription drug trade that has him facing perhaps the rest of his life in federal prison.
Smithers, 36, who lives in Greensboro, was found guilty Thursday in U.S. District Court in Abingdon of 861 federal drugs charges, including that his prescriptions caused the death of a woman in West Virginia.
The jury spent eight days hearing testimony and took seven hours of deliberation to find Smithers guilty of one count of maintaining a place for the purpose of illegally distributing controlled substances, one count of possession with the intent to distribute controlled substances, and 859 counts of illegally prescribing Schedule II controlled substances.
The jury also found that the oxycodone and oxymorphone Smithers prescribed to a woman from West Virginia caused her death.
“This defendant not only violated his Hippocratic Oath to his patients, but he perpetuated, on a massive scale, the vicious cycle of addiction, despair, and destruction,” U.S. Attorney Thomas T. Cullen said in a release announcing the verdict. “We have no higher priority than investigating drug-dealing physicians and other corrupt health-care practitioners and putting them in federal prison.”
United States District Court Judge James P. Jones ordered Smithers taken into custody pending sentencing, which was scheduled for 10 a.m. on Aug. 16.
Smithers faces a mandatory minimum sentence of 20 years and a maximum of life in federal prison. He also could face fines of more than $200 million.
Assistant United States Attorneys Cagle Juhan, Randy Ramseyer and Zachary T. Lee showed the jury how Smithers, who had been living in Greensboro, N.C., in 2015 opened an osteopathic medicine office on Commonwealth Boulevard in Martinsville.
He was listed on internet databases of physicians in the area as president and CEO of Smithers Community Healthcare. The telephone number for his office is no longer in service. He was charged formally in August 2017.
Evidence presented at trial showed Smithers prescribed controlled substances to every patient in his practice, resulting in more than 500,000 Schedule II controlled substances being distributed. The drugs involved included oxymorphone, oxycodone, hydromorphone, and fentanyl, a release from the Department of Justice said.
A majority of those receiving prescriptions from Smithers traveled hundreds of miles, one-way, to receive the drugs, court documents said. Smithers did not accept insurance and had taken in more than $700,000 in cash and credit card payments before a search warrant being executed at his office on March 7, 2017.
At the time of that search warrant, statistics showed that, in the city of Martinsville, more opioid painkillers were being given out as prescriptions per person than anywhere else in the United States.
That information came from a report released in 2017 by the Centers for Disease Contro called “Vital Signs,” which detailed the number of opioid painkillers given out by prescription in 59,000 pharmacies across America from 2010 to 2015.
On the one hand, the report found the majority of local areas saw a decrease in the total number prescribed over those five years.
The case was investigated by the Roanoke offices of the Drug Enforcement Administration’s Tactical Diversion Squad and the Health and Human Services — Office of Inspector General.
Task force officers with the police departments of Bristol, Martinsville, Buena Vista, Roanoke, and Roanoke County; the Sheriff’s Offices of Henry County and Pittsylvania County; and the Virginia State Police assisted in the investigation.