A Queens doctor and his nurse practitioner were busted by the U.S. Drug Enforcement Administration for allegedly running a prescription pill mill that sold over 6 million oxycodone pills between January 2015 and September 2018.
Dr. Dante Cubangbang and John Gargan's dirty prescription business first came to light when the DEA noticed the over 19,000 oxycodone prescriptions the clinic wrote. Official court papers showed that the clinic wrote a volume of oxycodone prescriptions that more than doubled any other Medicare and Medicaid prescriber in New York State.
The scam layout showed that ‘patients' of the clinic were made to pay $300 in cash for unnecessary prescriptions for oxycodone that were covered by Medicare and Medicaid. The clinic would them buy back some of the pills and then sell them to drug dealers.
Besides Cubangbang and Gargan 4 other employees of the clinic were also implicated in the pill mill operation.
An article published in the New York Post estimated the pill mill scam netted the clinic $5.7 million dollars.
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