A former doctor has been sentenced to a year and a half in prison for illegally distributing hundreds of thousands of opioids at his Victorville office.
Las Vegas resident Wendell Mark Street, 71, was sentenced Monday for illegally prescribing oxycodone “without a legitimate medical purpose,” the U.S. Department of Justice said in a news release.
The sentencing comes four years after Street’s guilty plea to two charges of improperly distributing oxycodone.
Street, who was an anesthesiologist, sold two prescriptions for oxycodone and alprazolam (also known by the brand name Xanax) for $300 each to an undercover investigator with the California Medical Board.
Between November 2012 and November 2013, he issued nearly 8,000 prescriptions, including about 437,000 doses of oxycodone.
“He wrote the prescriptions without a legitimate medical purpose and intentionally acted outside the usual course of professional practice, including by failing to conduct a physical examination, establish diagnostic testing, provide a treatment plan, and create documentation to establish a medication indication for the prescriptions,” the DOJ said.
Street gave up his medical license in 2016.
“A doctor holds a position of trust over his patients and with the government, which grants him the authority to write prescriptions for controlled substances for the medical needs of his patients,” prosecutors wrote in a sentencing memorandum. “[Street] violated his position of trust by selling prescription, thereby placing the lives of his patients at risk.”
