Former Shrewsbury Doctor Among 12 Slated to Have CDS Registration Revoked

As part of a measure designed to advance New Jersey's fight against what has become epidemic prescription drug abuse, Fair Haven resident and Shrewsbury doctor Jaqueline LoPresti has been targeted as one of 12 who state Consumer Affairs Director Eric T. Kanefsky is seeking to permanently strip of the ability to prescribe controlled dangerous substances (CDS), which include highly addictive painkillers, Acting NJ Attorney General John J. Hoffman announced today.

LoPresti's medical license was revoked in February of this year after she pleaded guilty and admitted in U.S. District Court for the District of New Jersey that she "engaged in the indiscriminate prescribing of CDS" a release from the Attorney General's Office said.

On July 29, LoPresti, 52, was sentenced to nearly five years, or 57 months, in federal prison, fined $5,000 and was ordered to forfeit $465,000 to the federal government for her crime.

LoPresti, now a former doctor of osteopathy, pleaded guilty to one count of conspiracy to distribute Oxycodone for her role in an illegal Oxycodone distribution ring. She was also charged with 11 counts of distribution of the narcotic, but only pleaded guilty to the one charge.

In the guilty plea documentation, LoPresti admitted to conspiring with New York Dr. Hassan Lahham in writing more than 6,000 illegal prescriptions for roughly 500,000 pills in 2009 that were purchased by patients with cash only, leaving no payment or paperwork records.

The charges against her stem from incidents noted in a federal criminal complaint, based on an investigation, that alleged the Rumson-Fair Haven Regional High School alumni, June to September 2009, met with various individuals at her medical office, home, and rest stops on the Garden State Parkway where she exchanged the Oxycodone prescriptions for cash.

In one incident in particular, federal records said, a confidential source brought cash in a paper bag that contained a blueberry muffin, left it on Lopresti’s front desk and got a prescription for 120 Oxycodone pills in exchange.

In addition to hundreds of thousands of dollars in cash she accepted in exchange for the narcotic, investigation records said that she LoPresti also accepted all sorts of gifts, such as bottles of wine, from those for whom she illegally wrote the prescriptions.  

“Revocation of a doctor’s CDS registration, when a doctor has already been criminally convicted or lost his or her license, creates an additional barrier that will protect the public, should any of these doctors seek to have their medical license restored,” Acting Attorney General Hoffman said in the release.

“We are engaged in an all-out effort to stem an epidemic in which opiate pain pills are a primary gateway drug. As part of this fight, we are protecting the public from doctors convicted of being part of the problem, or who lost their license due to findings that they were part of the problem.”
 
Physicians obtain their medical licenses through the state Board of Medical Examiners. But no licensed physician can prescribe controlled dangerous substances (CDS), such as the highly addictive Oxycodone, without a CDS registration. That registration is granted by the director of the Division of Consumer Affairs.
 
Revocation of a physician’s CDS registration provides an extra layer of protection to the public, should the revoked doctor ask the Board of Medical Examiners for a reinstatement of his or her medical license, the release said.

Even if the board restores the doctor’s license to practice medicine, these individuals would still need to apply to the Consumer Affairs Director for reinstatement of his or her CDS registration. The doctor would be required to make a clear and detailed demonstration as to why restoration of his or her CDS registration would be in the public interest, it added.