As a prominent health care educator and advocate for chronic pain patients and their clinicians, I receive a large number of emails and potential papers in venues where I am active. Every week, I hear from people who have been harmed by U.S. government misdirection and outright health care fraud. Increasing numbers of those who come to me are doctors who have been railroaded into prison and had their lives destroyed by federal or state law enforcement authorities run amuck.

What follows here is a current horrid example. To the best of my knowledge and belief, the details of this narrative are fully verifiable in court proceedings available to the public. And in my opinion, those details fully support the investigation, prosecution, conviction and jailing of not only the DEA agents who persecuted these two individuals, but also quite possibly the judge who actively facilitated their persecution of an innocent and badly overworked physician and her son.

Dr. Janis F-G is a board-certified internist. Jonathan G. is her son, a Marine Corps veteran and EMT/firefighter who had been accepted to medical school and was two weeks from enrollment when he was arrested. Neither of them is nor was a pain management practitioner. I will let the injured parties tell their own story in their own voice.

Who I am

I practiced medicine for twenty-five years without a single complaint to the Texas Medical Board. I was a hospitalist, a chief of staff at hospitals in the Galveston and Houston area, a researcher, a COVID-19 frontline provider, and a community physician who ran a transitional care clinic serving elderly, post-acute, and chronically ill patients in Webster, Texas City, La Marque and Hitchcock, Texas.

I treated incarcerated patients dying of AIDS during my residency and infectious disease training. I stayed at Mainland Medical Center through Hurricane Ike while UTMB Galveston was non-operational, working nearly twenty-hour shifts alongside my son. I responded during the BP refinery explosion, during COVID-19, and during the Texas freeze. I am not a drug dealer. I am not a pill mill operator. I am a doctor whose career was ended by a manufactured DEA sting operation, a stolen DEA registration number, and a legal standard the United States Supreme Court later rejected in Ruan v. United States.

I am sharing this story because what happened to me is happening to physicians across this country. If we do not name it plainly, it will continue.

How it started: a stolen DEA number

In late 2015, I accepted a short-term locum tenens placement at a clinic in Houston while recovering from emergency neck surgery. A medical recruiter who later became the criminal informant introduced me to the clinic operator. After approximately two weeks, I grew uncomfortable with what I saw. I checked the Texas Medical Board registry, confirmed the clinic was not registered, and left.

What I did not know was that the clinic retained my DEA registration number after I left. That number was then used without my knowledge or authorization to generate thousands of controlled substance prescriptions across the west side of Houston. The Texas Prescription Monitoring Program later showed prescriptions bearing my number continuing to appear even after my arrest, including during a period when I was in custody or under court supervision and physically incapable of prescribing.

The government initially attributed nearly 19,000 controlled substance prescriptions to my DEA registration number. That was impossible. During the same period, I was working as a hospitalist and generating approximately 15,000 hospital patient encounters per year. A patient-by-patient comparison showed I had never met the patients listed in the PMP data. My defense team proposed that prosecutors take a random selection of those patients and ask them to identify me from a photograph. The government did not do so.

After my defense team and Jonathan compared the PMP data against my hospital records, the prosecutor acknowledged that fraudulent activity had occurred on my DEA account. The government then agreed to limit relevant conduct to four prescriptions from a single DEA undercover operation. That concession abandoned 18,835 of the 18,839 prescriptions that had been attributed to me.

The person who actually used my DEA number was never charged, never publicly identified, and remains at large operating a DJ radio show on the west side of Houston. The original DEA informant who introduced me to the thief is now dead from obesity and heart failure.

The DEA sting

In August 2018, the same recruiter who had introduced me to the Houston clinic three years earlier reappeared. He contacted me about a business meeting. I attended believing it was connected to clinic management and possible administrative support. I did not know I was now the DEA’s target. The meeting had been scripted in advance under DEA supervision.

I arrived from an active hospital shift. The recorded transcript opens with me still on a clinical call, directing nursing staff on sedation management and orders for a critically ill ICU patient. When the subject of pain prescribing came up, I stated that I would not work at any clinic not registered with the Texas Medical Board. I said it repeatedly. I stated that any clinic had to be “above board.” I raised concerns about DEA enforcement risk, pharmacy-board scrutiny, and the need for real patients with real medical conditions.

Over two visits to my clinic in August and September 2018, the informant presented himself as a patient and later brought names and identification information for other people. I conducted a clinical encounter. I wrote four prescriptions. Not one of those prescriptions was ever filled. Not one controlled substance was dispensed. No patient was harmed. No drug was diverted. No money changed hands other than ordinary office fees consistent with my clinic’s cash-pay schedule.

The disparity becomes even clearer when compared to Joan Rubinger, a family nurse practitioner in Stockton, California. According to the government’s own complaint and settlement record, Rubinger operated a nationwide cash-for-prescriptions scheme from November 2019 to June 2024, used encrypted Telegram communications, met customers in hotel rooms across more than twenty states, gave customers price lists for controlled substances, and distributed a document titled “The Rules” instructing customers how to minimize attention from the DEA.

There was no equivalent rules list in my case. There was no price menu. There was no encrypted communication channel. There were no hotel-room transactions. There were no false names supplied by me to conceal prescribing. There was no five-year cash business. There was no nationwide customer base. There was no proof that any prescription I wrote in the undercover operation was ever filled.

Rubinger allegedly violated the Controlled Substances Act on at least 900 occasions and dispensed controlled substances including oxycodone, Percocet, Xanax, Adderall, methadone, Norco, and alprazolam. For one customer alone, the government alleged she dispensed 1,860 methadone pills, 90 Norco pills, 912 oxycodone pills, and 12,890 Percocet pills, a total of 15,752 pills.

Yet the Eastern District of California resolved Rubinger’s case through a civil settlement, a permanent injunction, and no criminal charges. My case involved four prescriptions in a DEA-controlled operation. None was filled. No controlled substance was dispensed. No patient was harmed. No ongoing clinic opened. No additional prescriptions followed. Still, the Southern District of Texas prosecuted me and my son criminally, sent me to federal prison for fifteen months, destroyed my medical license, and left my son with a felony conviction that ended his medical career before it began.

That is the disparity I cannot reconcile. The government treated a California nurse practitioner accused of a five-year, multi-state, cash-based controlled-substance operation as a civil enforcement matter. It treated me, a Texas physician with twenty-five years of service and four unfilled prescriptions from a manufactured sting, as a federal criminal.

Three months passed. Neither I nor my son made a single outgoing call to the informant. No clinic opened. No patients were referred. No additional prescriptions were written. People building a criminal enterprise pursue it. We did nothing because there was nothing to pursue.

On December 18, 2018, DEA agents entered my home at approximately 6:00 a.m. My son Jonathan, a trained EMT and United States Marine Corps veteran, was arrested separately and brought to my home while the search was ongoing. His visible detention was used as pressure while agents questioned me outside, without counsel and before any Miranda warning. They pressured me to surrender my DEA registration number. I did.

The government also seized money from my home. Sworn affidavits established that the funds were rental income accumulated after Hurricane Ike destroyed the first level of my home in 2008. The prosecutor conditioned any plea offer on my agreement to forfeit those funds. My first defense counsel did not effectively contest the inflated PMP data at the proffer. I eventually pled guilty under the legal standard that existed before Ruan.

What the Supreme Court later held

I entered my guilty plea on January 13, 2020. On June 27, 2022, the United States Supreme Court decided Ruan v. United States. The Court held that, once a physician produces evidence of authorization to prescribe, the government must prove beyond a reasonable doubt that the physician knowingly or intentionally acted in an unauthorized manner.

That standard matters. The government cannot convict a physician merely by arguing that the doctor should have known better or departed from what a hypothetical reasonable doctor would have done. The government must prove the doctor’s actual subjective knowledge.

The record in my case does not satisfy that standard. I held an active DEA registration. I held an X-number authorizing me to prescribe buprenorphine for opioid use disorder treatment. I stated repeatedly that any clinic arrangement had to be registered with the Texas Medical Board. I identified DEA and pharmacy red flags. I corrected a requested quantity downward on clinical grounds. When a prescription form was voided, I stated aloud that it had to be mailed back to the DEA. I was simultaneously managing admitted hospital patients by telephone during the undercover encounters.

Those facts are inconsistent with subjective knowledge of criminal unauthorized prescribing. They show a distracted, exhausted physician who made serious mistakes. They do not show a doctor who knowingly joined a drug distribution scheme.

My plea was entered before Ruan, under a legal framework the Supreme Court later rejected. I have filed a pro se petition asking the Department of Justice to move under Federal Rule of Criminal Procedure 48(a) to dismiss my conviction. I have also submitted a petition for pardon.

What the punishment has done

I served fifteen months in federal prison. I permanently lost my Texas medical license. I lost my board certification. The conviction triggered exclusion consequences that prevent participation in Medicare, Medicaid, and other federal health care programs. In practical terms, it ended the career I spent decades building.

My son Jonathan was convicted as an aider and abettor. He had a degree in genetics and molecular biology. He was accepted to medical school and was scheduled to leave Texas for enrollment two weeks after the arrest. He is a Marine Corps veteran. His medical career was destroyed because, on one exhausted clinic day, I asked him to help write out forms related to prescriptions I should not have written for people I had not personally examined.

I accept responsibility for my poor judgment. I should have stopped the encounter. I should have refused. I should have taken stronger steps years earlier when I first learned my DEA number had been misused. I should have sought counsel immediately and changed my DEA number. I failed to do those things.

But punishment must still be proportionate. In my case, the prescriptions were not filled. No pills entered circulation. No patient was harmed. No overdose occurred. No ongoing clinic existed. No continuing criminal enterprise followed. The government’s broader prescription theory rested on fraudulent use of my DEA number by another person.

The Department of Justice’s own enforcement record includes cases involving practitioners who engaged in far more serious conduct, including sustained cash-for-prescriptions operations, pre-signed controlled-substance prescriptions, thousands of pills dispensed to real patients, and multi-state prescription schemes. Some of those cases resolved through civil monetary penalties, registration surrenders, or administrative action rather than criminal prosecution.

I wrote four prescriptions in a DEA-controlled operation. None were filled. I went to prison.

The broader pattern

Dr. L. Joseph Parker, writing from a federal prison on KevinMD.com, described the same pattern from inside the system: physicians prosecuted through a process in which the goal too often becomes conviction rather than justice. He described how doctors who treated complicated patients in good faith can be portrayed as criminals when government-paid experts reinterpret clinical judgment after the fact.

His story is not isolated. Mine is not isolated. The National Campaign to Protect People in Pain exists because physicians, patients, families, and communities have been harmed by a system that treats pain care as suspicious by default.

When physicians fear prosecution for treating pain, they stop treating pain. When doctors stop treating pain, patients do not disappear. They go to emergency rooms. They are abandoned. Some turn to the street supply. Some die. The criminalization of medical judgment has not solved the opioid crisis. It has deepened suffering for patients and destroyed physicians who were trying to care for them.

What I am asking

I am not asking for sympathy. I am asking for correction. The law changed. The record matters. The fraud was not mine. The prescriptions were never filled. No controlled substance was dispensed. No patient was harmed. My conviction was obtained under a legal standard the Supreme Court has since rejected.

I want my case dismissed. I want my son’s record cleared. I want the person who used my DEA number for years to be held accountable. I want physicians in America to be able to treat patients without practicing adversarial medicine, where every patient could be an informant and every clinical mistake can be converted into a federal felony.

I spent my life serving patients, hospitals, prisoners, disaster victims, first responders, COVID patients, elderly patients, and my community. I made mistakes. But I was not a drug dealer. I was not a pill mill operator. I was a doctor.

The law, the facts, and the interest of justice support correction.

A parting suggestion by the author

Although the narrative above was written as a warning to clinicians, it can and should also be read as a call to action on their part. It is time to stand up and be counted. U.S. law enforcement is relying on its power of intimidation to destroy the lives of your colleagues and your patients. It is time for health care professionals to telephone their legislators at all levels. It is time to demand an end to this madness.

In the face of the willful refusal of DEA and other law enforcement agencies to obey ethical standards, the repeal of the Controlled Substances Act of 1970 and abolishment of the U.S. Drug Enforcement Administration are not too much to ask.

Richard A. Lawhern is a nationally recognized health care educator and patient advocate who has spent nearly three decades researching pain management and addiction policy. His extensive body of work, including over 300 published papers and interviews, reflects a deep critique of U.S. health care agencies and their approaches to chronic pain treatment. Now retired from formal academic and hospital affiliations, Richard continues to engage with professional and public audiences through platforms such as LinkedIn, Facebook, and his contributions to KevinMD. His advocacy extends to online communities like Protect People in Pain, where he works to elevate the voices of patients navigating restrictive opioid policies. Among his many publications is a guideline on opioid use for chronic non-cancer pain, reflecting his commitment to evidence-based reform in pain medicine.