California doctor who became opioid ‘drug dealer’ gets 12 years in prison

A Tustin doctor who illegally distributed opioid pills linked to the death of an off-duty Costa Mesa fire captain, the suspected gunman in the Borderline Bar & Grill mass shooting and at least five overdose deaths was sentenced to more than 12 years in federal prison Friday, June 9, authorities said.

Dr. Dzung Ahn Pham, who was also fined $35,000 Friday, was the owner of Irvine Village Urgent Care at the time he distributed more than 120,000 pills from Jan. 1, 2013 to Dec. 17, 2018, U.S. Attorney’s Office spokesman Ciaran McEvoy said.

During that time, he wrote prescriptions for about 53,000 oxycodone pills, 68,000 hydrocodone pills and 29,000 pills of amphetamine salts using 18 different patient names, in exchange for cash and insurance payments, according to a plea agreement submitted in October when he pleaded guilty to conspiracy to distribute controlled substances.

“(Pham), a licensed physician trusted by society and the patients that went to him, stopped treating patients and, plain and simple, became a drug dealer,” prosecutors said in court documents asking for the maximum possible sentence. “He turned ‘patients’ into addicts and/or fueled the addictions of drug abusers.”

In that memo, prosecutors sought a sentence of nearly 20 years.

Federal authorities had previously accused Pham, 61, of flooding Southern California “with huge quantities of opioids and other dangerous narcotics by writing prescriptions for drugs he knew would be diverted to the street.”