Prisoner of greed –
Jan. 2, 2021 – Li would later become known as a notoriously reckless supplier of lethal drugs — the first doctor in New York state to be convicted of killing his patients with pills.
For $150 in cash, which he would slip into his white coat pocket, Li freely wrote out prescriptions for potent narcotics to anybody willing to pay, virtually no questions asked.
“It’s very mechanical,” said one witness at his trial, according to “Bad Medicine: Catching New York’s Deadliest Pill Pusher,” by Charlotte Bismuth which was published by One Signal. “He’s doing it to feed an addiction network as part of his business model.”
And the results were devastating: 16 people died of overdoses, some within days of seeing Li, writes Bismuth — the prosecutor who put him away.
One baffling part of Li’s practice was that he was a highly educated physician who emigrated from China as an MD, did a fellowship at the University of Pittsburgh Hospital and worked for Robert Wood Johnson Hospital in New Jersey.
