Pain clinic pioneer Barry Schultz, now sentenced by a Florida judge to 157 years in prison for drug trafficking, says he is a scapegoat. The mother of his patient who died of an overdose after Schulz prescribed him hundreds of opioid pills calls him a murderer. Bill Whitaker continues to investigate the origins of the opioid epidemic on the 51st Season Premiere of 60 Minutes, Sunday, Sept. 30 at 7:30 p.m. ET and 7 p.m. PT on CBS.
Sunday’s story is Whitaker’s sixth report on the drug crisis, an epidemic that last year alone took the lives of more Americans than the Vietnam War.
“I’m a scapegoat… I see myself as a healer,” says Schultz, who made more than $6,000 a day prescribing and selling opioids to patients, but claims he knew nothing about the rise in addiction and death. Had he known, “I would have moderated my approach.” He says he was singled out unfairly, one of hundreds of physicians prescribing large amounts of medicine for chronic pain. DEA records show Schultz dispensed 800,000 opioid pills in a 16-month period from his clinic’s pharmacy. One patient received doses equaling 60 high-potency oxycodone pills a day. “60 a day is a large amount, I admit. But if it’s taken properly, some people need that dose,” Schultz says.
Pressed by Whitaker about the people getting addicted and dying of overdoses, including his patients, Schultz shot back, “A person,” to which Whitaker replies, “One is enough.”
That person was David Tain, who visited Schultz for pain after he was in a car accident, and developed an addiction. Tain overdosed on pills prescribed by Schultz. “[Schultz] hadn’t even seen him in four and a half years,” says his mother, Carol Tain. “He’s a murderer and not a doctor,” she tells Whitaker. “He didn’t need a gun. He used his pen to murder my son.”
Florida was awash in opioids; millions of prescribed pills were being diverted to the black market. In 2009, 2900 people died in Florida of drug overdoses, mostly from prescribed opioid pills. But who is more responsible, doctors like Schultz, or the manufacturers and distributors who supply huge amounts of the addictive drugs? Many of the pills prescribed by Schultz came from a company called Mallinckrodt, and the DEA launched an investigation into the company and built a case, the first against a manufacturer. Internal Justice Department documents obtained by 60 Minutes reveal, “Mallinckrodt’s own data on Barry Schultz indicated that he was purchasing large amounts of oxycodone in a suspicious pattern indicated diversion.”
When the results of the DEA investigation into the company were given to the Justice Department, it decided to settle the charges on Mallinckrodt out of court. The drug distributor agreed to pay a fine of $35 million, or less than a week’s worth of the company’s yearly revenue.
Mallinckrodt would not come on camera but told 60 Minutes it never sold directly to Schultz, only distributors. It denied “it violated any applicable laws.” It also said it would make changes to its drug monitoring program and identify suspicious sales.
According to Florida Attorney General Dave Aronberg, Mallinckrodt sent 500 million oxycodone pills to his state between 2008 and 2012. “We’re talking about enough pills to give every resident of Florida 25 oxycodone pills, enough pills to create an entire state of addicts,” says Aronberg.
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