Though it has been six years since she was caught, the California poster child for dirty doctors, and how they contribute to America's Opioid crisis, has finally and justly been sentenced to a long prison term.
Hsiu-Ying “Lisa” Tseng was sentenced to 30 years to life today, after being convicted of killing three people by recklessly prescribing them large amounts of narcotic pain killers they didn't need. She is the first doctor to be convicted of murder in the U.S. for overprescribing drugs, according to the Los Angeles Times. Prosecutors had charged Tseng with murder for the overdose deaths of Vu Nguyen, 28, Steven Ogle, 25, and Joey Rovero, 21.
Unbelievably, some experts had earlier told the Times that they were worried that a conviction would have a chilling effect on doctors.
Well, good.
If a doctor, like Tseng, writes more than 27,000 prescriptions over a three-year period – an average of 25 a day, they should be chilled. If they prescribe drugs to people with no legitimate need, fraudulently prescribe prescriptions for the husband of a patient so that the patient could double her pill count and ignore more than a dozen calls from law enforcement and the coroner's office, telling her that her patients have died, they should be concerned that the law is at the door.
Opioid overdose deaths, including both opioid pain relievers and heroin, have become a national epidemic, hitting record levels in 2014, with an alarming 14 percent increase in just one year, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. From 2000 to 2014 nearly half a million Americans died from drug overdoses. The most commonly prescribed opioid pain relievers, those classified as natural or semi-synthetic opioids such as oxycodone and hydrocodone, continue to be involved in more overdose deaths than any other opioid type. These deaths increased by 9 percent (813 more deaths in 2014 than 2013), the CDC reported.
In California, 12 people die every day to preventable drug overdose, more than any other state in the nation. State Sen. Ricardo Lara has been trying to help end the crisis in California by introducing SB 482.
The bill would require physicians to check the California’s Controlled Substance Utilization Review and Evaluation System (CURES) drug monitoring program database when prescribing Schedule II or III drugs like oxycontin to a patient for the first time, and annually thereafter if the treatment continues. The bill passed the state Senate last year and now heads to the Assembly.
In January, the Attorney General’s office announced that CURES 2.0, a two-year $1.9 million upgrade to the CURES database, was open to all physicians and pharmacists. Every health care provider licensed to prescribe or dispense medications must register to access the database by July 1, 2016.
Recently, a number of presidential candidates have spoken publicly about fighting the scourge of overprescribing, and President Obama this week proposed another $1.2 billion in federal funding to raise the ante in the fight against opioid abuse, including funds to expand the use of state prescription drug databases, such as CURES.
The CDC is also finalizing new opioid prescribing guidelines that recommend physicians use prescription drug databases to curb overprescribing. (Read Consumer Watchdog’s comments on those guidelines.)
In the face of this overwhelming support to combat this epidemic, the California Legislature should pass SB 482. As Joey Rovero's mother, April, told the Times:
"Addicts and people seeking medications aren't in control," she said. "Doctors are the ones who are supposed to push back. They have a duty."
