GET OUT OF JAIL FREE CARD –
Feb. 3, 2023 – He was at the center of a Supreme Court ruling in January 2022 that raised the bar for what prosecutors must prove to secure convictions of doctors accused of fueling the U.S. opioid crisis by turning their medical practices into “pill mills.”
Kahn’s lawyer, Beau Brindley, said in a statement Friday’s decision “should pave the way to finally ending the practice of unfairly scapegoating doctors for an opiate crisis for which they were never responsible.”
Kahn, 56, has been serving a 25-year prison sentence after a jury in Wyoming in 2019 found him guilty of unlawfully distributing prescription medications, operating a continuing criminal enterprise and other charges.
Prosecutors said Kahn from 2011 to 2016 prescribed powerful pain drugs to people in Arizona and Wyoming in exchange for money after performing perfunctory or no examinations. They included one woman who died of an oxycodone overdose.
At trial, Kahn did not contest that patients abused their medications but disputed what his intent was in prescribing them drugs, asserting he had a “good faith” reason to believe his prescriptions were valid.
