After a two week trial, John Michael "Mike" Gowder, 61, of Nashville, Tennessee and James Heaton, 63, of Blairsville, Georgia have been convicted in federal court for illegally prescribing and obtaining more than 15,000 doses of prescription pain medications outside the scope of normal medical practice.
U.S. Attorney General BJay Pak said in a press statement the pair had faced 102 criminal counts in the case.
In addition, Heaton was convicted of 27 counts of issuing prescriptions to two female patients outside the usual course of professional medical practice and for no legitimate medical purpose.
"When doctors prescribe opioids outside of the applicable rules, they are nothing but drug traffickers with a medical degree," said Pak. “Therefore, we will accordingly treat them as such.”
Robert J. Murphy, the Special Agent in Charge of the DEA Atlanta Division legal drugs distributed for non-medical reasons can be just as deadly as illicit drugs.
"The defendants in this case distributed vast quantities of pharmaceutical products and had ill-will and total disregard for human life," Murphy said.
From 2011 to 2016, Mike Gowder was the Chief Operating Officer and later Chief Executive Officer of Union General Hospital in Blairsville, and Dr. James Heaton operated a family practice clinic in Blairsville, Georgia, and worked as the Medical Director of the Nursing Home of Union General Hospital.
According to court testimony, during that time, Heaton illegally prescribed increasing quantities of hydrocodone and oxycodone to Gowder, knowing that the prescriptions were issued outside the usual course of professional practice and that the pills obtained with the prescriptions had no legitimate medical purpose. Heaton violated numerous standards of medical practice by prescribing the pills to Gowder without adequately documenting the medical need for the prescriptions in his patient file and without monitoring patient abuse of the pills he obtained. During the three and half years in which Heaton prescribed more than 15,000 hydrocodone and oxycodone pills to Gowder, only six of the prescriptions were recorded in his patient file for Gowder.
Starting in 2012, Gowder obtained oxycodone by fraud by filling the illegal prescriptions that Heaton issued for oxycodone at different pharmacies in Georgia, Tennessee and North Carolina.
Testimony also indicated on multiple occasions, Heaton wrote two prescriptions for oxycodone for Gowder on the same day. Gowder would travel to North Carolina to fill one prescription and Tennessee to fill the second prescription to conceal the fact that multiple prescriptions were written to him on the same day.
As part of the case, on March 15, 2019, Dr. George David Gowder pleaded guilty to a single count of the superseding indictment in this case for illegal dispensing medications outside the scope of professional practice and without a legitimate medical purpose.
Sentencing for Mike Gowder and James Heaton have not yet been scheduled.
This case was brought as part of Operation SCOPE, Strategically Combating Opioids through Prosecution and Enforcement. SCOPE is our initiative combining our efforts (criminal, civil, and educational) with those of our law enforcement partners to create one unified front in the battle against the opioid/heroin epidemic. One important aspect of Operation SCOPE is to prosecute those who are illegally prescribing, or distributing, painkillers.
