April 21, 2023

This week a court in Texas sentenced Anthony Obute to 17 years in prison and ordered him to pay $4 million to Medicare, a United States government-run healthcare agency.  

Obute, 47-years-old, was the owner of Keystone Pharmacy in Houston, Texas. Among the charges he faced was that he conspired with Dr. Shivarajpur Ravi to illegally sell hydrocodone and carisoprodol, two opioid pain killer drugs which can only be sold via a doctor’s prescription.

In December 2021, Ravi was arrested and charged with alleged illegal sale of prescription pain killers. Ravi, 66-years-old, operated two pain management clinics in the Houston area. Ravi was reportedly released on bail pending trial.

“The illegal distribution of prescription narcotics worsens the nationwide opioid crisis that is destroying lives and wreaking havoc on families,” Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton said in a statement this week, in connection with Obute’s conviction. In 2021, more than 106,000 persons in the U.S. died from drug-involved overdose, including illicit drugs and prescription opioids.

In 2021, prosecutors alleged that from about September 2018 to about September 2020, Obute directed Keystone to purchase around 1.1 million of the highest-strength, short-acting hydrocodone and oxycodone pills commercially available. He then allegedly sold the pills to so-called “crew leaders,” or drug traffickers who pay individuals to pose as patients in order to obtain pills to sell onto the black market.

Crew leaders and gang associates brought fictitious patients to Ravi’s clinic for pain management prescriptions, prosecutors allege. For each “patient” they brought in, they paid the clinic $420. In exchange, Ravi allegedly issued prescriptions for opioid pain medications to Obute, who allowed crew leaders to collect the prescriptions for sale on the streets. 

According to court documents filed by prosecutors, undercover police officers obtained illegitimate prescriptions from Ravi at his clinic in Houston in 2020 and, in 2021, at his new clinic in Pasadena, near Houston. The purported consultation with Ravi is alleged to have lasted less than two minutes, after which officers had the prescription filled at Obute’s Keystone Pharmacy. In both cases, Ravi prescribed large quantities of hydrocodone and carisoprodol to the officers.

Prosecutors described how crew leaders were observed paying for groups of patients, filling out their paperwork, and coaching them on what to say to the doctor as they waited to be seen.

Ravi reportedly earned his medical degree from the University fo Mysore, Adichunchanagiri Institute of Medical Science, India, in 1981. .

If prosecutors bring criminal charges against Ravi and he is convicted, he could face 20 years or more in prison.

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