Pawankumar Jain, 66, a former physician, was sentenced in federal court in Las Cruces, New Mexico to nine years of imprisonment and three years of supervised release for unlawfully dispensing controlled substances and health care fraud, said the US Attorney John Anderson.

Pawankumar Jain, in the past had entered guilty pleas in February 2016 to one count of unlawfully dispensing a controlled substance and one count of health care fraud.

In his appeal agreement, Pawankumar Jain had admitted that he was earlier licensed to practice medicine in the State of New Mexico and was registered with the Drug Enforcement Administration (DEA) to prescribe controlled substances, including pain medication.

He also admitted that for several years he operated a high-volume "pain management" practice in Las Cruces, and regularly performed only "cursory" examinations of his patients before prescribing them narcotics without documenting any therapeutic benefit for those drugs in his records.

He particularly admitted examining one patient in November 2009 and had conducted only a superficial examination of the patient before writing him two prescriptions for methadone which were outside the standard course of medical practice and not for any legitimate medical purpose. Each prescription given was for 270 tablets of 10 mg methadone. He further admitted that he committed health care fraud because he knew these unlawful prescriptions would be submitted to federal health insurance Medicare for payment and that he proposed for Medicare to pay for the prescriptions.

Pawankumar Jain acknowledged that the patient died two days after filling the second methadone prescription. The patient died of respiratory depression due to the methadone prescription, according to evidence at the sentencing hearing. The New Mexico Medical Board had suspended Jains license in June 2012, and revoked his license in December 2012.

Anderson said US law enforcement agencies are committed to working to aggressively target and hold drug traffickers accountable. He further said that doctors who betray our trust and put their own financial gain ahead of the well-being of their patients by prescribing narcotics without medical justification are directly fuelling our nations opioid crisis.

Special Agent in Charge Kyle Williamson of the DEAs El Paso Division said that Pawankumar Jain had ignored the oath which they take to treat and care for patients who come to them for help, and continued to overprescribe, which eventually resulted in the deaths of four patients. He further said, "His sentence today will send a message to other doctors that they are not above the law and DEA will continue to forcefully follow and hold them responsible."