A North Carolina doctor connected to a controversial telemedicine operation aimed at treating opioid addiction has been charged with participating in a conspiracy to illegally use other doctors’ authority to write prescriptions for controlled substances.
Dr. Henry Emery, the former medical director of a multistate company called Bupe.me, has already been indicted on 10 counts of conspiracy to prescribe the addiction treatment drug buprenorphine without a legitimate medical purpose. The company reported having thousands of customers in at least 15 states, including South Carolina.
According to the new indictment, Emery faces at least $447,495 in cash forfeitures in connection with all charges. Under the maximum sentence, Emery could face life in prison and more than $5.7 million in fines. He surrendered his North Carolina medical license in December, state records show.
The latest conspiracy charges overlap with details uncovered by The Post and Courier in December and deepen the legal burden on the group’s founder, Douglas Randall Smith, a former doctor who had a home on Sullivan’s Island. Smith established the group as a tax-exempt church that has operated under the names Church Ekklasia Sozo, Rural Opioid Treatment Program and Bupe.me.
He is currently the subject of a Florida grand jury investigation into tax evasion, offshore accounts, Paycheck Protection Program loan of $285,600 According to subpoenas obtained by the Journal, Smith never repaid the company.
Authorities in at least six states — South Carolina, Massachusetts, Alabama, North Carolina, Kentucky and Texas — have raised questions about the company’s prescription practices, licensing and non-profit status.
And a civil lawsuit filed in Charleston by former consultant and now whistleblower Ned Brown seeks to bar Smith from the company, which runs a telehealth business that prescribes medications aimed at curbing cravings for prescription painkillers, fentanyl and heroin and other opioids.
Smith, who lost his license after the Florida Medical Board determined that his liberal prescription of painkillers led to a patient’s death, appointed Emery as his medical director in 2018. A few months earlier, a 56-year-old patient at Emery’s family medicine practice in North Carolina died of an overdose of multiple drugs prescribed by Emery, the third patient Emery had died of an overdose in 15 months. According to the North Carolina Medical Board.
The two men, accused of recklessly prescribing painkillers, used Bupe.me to treat their drug addictions with suboxone, a combination of buprenorphine, which suppresses cravings, and naloxone, which prevents overdoses. Investigators say they continued to ignore the rules, giving medication to patients who didn’t see a doctor. According to documents provided to the Post by Smith, the two DEA agents signed up for Bupe.me in 2019 and paid cash for prescriptions without ever meeting or speaking with Emery.
According to Brown’s lawsuit, Bupe.me’s revenue soared from $700,000 in 2019 to more than $5 million by 2022.
According to Medicare data, no doctor in North Carolina prescribed more buprenorphine to patients than Emery through 2021. Emery prescribed more buprenorphine than 99.9% of prescribers in the U.S. in 2020 and 2021, when the pandemic caused a surge in demand for the telehealth model that Bupe.me uses, according to the data. Only 27 doctors prescribed more than Emery.
Dr. Henry Emery faces 12 federal charges related to prescription fraud.
Emery prescribed more opioid addiction medications than any other doctor in the state in 2020-21 while working for the telemedicine company Bupe.me, according to Medicare data.
Total Monthly Supply of Buprenorphine Prescribed by Physicians in North Carolina, 2020-2021
Source: Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services
Dr. Henry Emery faces 12 federal charges related to prescription fraud.
Emery prescribed more opioid addiction medications than any other doctor in the state in 2020-21, while working for the telemedicine company Bupe.me, according to Medicare data.
Total Monthly Supply of Buprenorphine Prescribed by Physicians in North Carolina, 2020-2021
The new conspiracy charges suggest those figures may be an understatement. Emery is accused of participating in a conspiracy to distribute controlled substances in the names of other prescribers. While the indictment does not name Emery’s co-conspirators, the timeline it outlines, from 2018 to 2022, is consistent with his time at Bupe.me.
Allegations of prescription fraud have been swirling around Bupe.me for the past year. One former Bupe.me contractor told of an instance where prescriptions were written without his knowledge at the North Carolina Medical Board. Another contractor spoke to federal authorities. Both confirmed the story in interviews with The Post and Courier.
Ms. Emery’s lawyer did not return calls to her office and cell phone, and a Justice Department spokesman declined to comment.
January 2021, Emery was interrogated. Smith met with investigators from the North Carolina Medical Board at the company’s Weddington, North Carolina offices in the city, and both Smith and a lawyer for Bupe.me were present, according to investigators’ notes from the meeting.
According to the memo, Emery wrote dozens of prescriptions in his own name to patients in states where he did not have a medical license, but could not explain why.
Smith blamed the problem on a software glitch, but the company that makes the software told The Post and Courier that the kind of glitch Smith described did not exist.
The IRS has been trying to get Smith to pay unpaid taxes for years, and his bills are It reached $26 million.He allegedly purchased a home on Sullivan’s Island, expensive jewelry, designer clothes and a plane while avoiding paying taxes.
Smith acknowledged misusing funds from his nonprofit business in an interview with The Post and Courier last year after the newspaper analyzed his bank records.
After losing his medical license, Smith launched a multimillion-dollar business testing urine samples for traces of drugs before founding Bupe.me. The business collapsed after whistle-blower allegations that Smith paid illegal bribes to doctors who agreed to use his lab. In March 2021, Smith paid $4.5 million to the federal government to settle the lab testing case without pleading guilty.
Smith last year called the case against Emery “the largest DEA fraud case in the history of the United States.”
This week, he ignored calls, texts and emails from reporters.
