Boyfriend and psychiatrist convicted of conspiring to give model excessive amounts of prescription drugs—After a two month trial, a Los Angeles court convicted Howard K Stern and Khristine Eroshevich for conspiring to give her excessive amounts of painkillers, antidepressants and other prescription drugs.
The military-pharmaceutical complex is making a killing or, more specifically, making a fortune off the folks we’ve asked to do the killing — and off the rest of us. They dope our unruly kids, they dope the young men and women fighting in and returning home from the war, and they dope the rest of us right here at home for being sick of wars overseas and fearful of war on the middle and lower classes and dreading the reckonings to come and being ashamed of our own sad national shadow.
In an unprecedented move, a coalition of 45 public and private bodies and charities has pledged to transform the way patients are treated and drive down the use of anti-psychotic drugs. Experts have argued that the ‘chemical cosh’, recommended for short-term use to calm down people who are agitated, has been widely over-prescribed for dementia sufferers in an attempt to keep them quiet, particularly in care homes.
A Miami doctor wrote nearly 97,000 prescriptions in 18 months for mental health drugs. An Ohio physician wrote more than 100,000 prescriptions in two years. A Texas doctor wrote more than 14,000 prescriptions for the anti-anxiety drug Xanax. These alarmingly high prescriptions numbers for mental health drugs covered by Medicare and Medicaid have prompted Senator Charles Grassley (R-Iowa) to call for an investigation, the Associated Press reports.
Minnesota doctors are again under the microscope of an influential U.S. senator from Iowa — this time because of concerns that expensive medications are being overprescribed at great cost to the publicly funded Medicaid and Medicare programs. U.S. Sen. Charles Grassley, R-Iowa, notified federal authorities Wednesday that he found potential examples of overprescribing after requesting lists from states, including Minnesota, of doctors who issued the most prescriptions for antipsychotic and narcotic medications in 2008 and 2009.