In case you needed a reminder of the extraordinary value of local newspapers, The Post and Courier of Charleston, South Carolina, recently published a stellar investigation of a man who claims he can end the opioid crisis. Douglas Randall Smith is a grifter of the classic American variety: a self-proclaimed prophet selling snake oil to people desperate to be cured of what ails them. His business, which he runs with dubious partners, is even registered as a non-profit church:
In October 2017, Smith became one of three founders of Church Ekklasia Sozo in Charlotte. Its name roughly translates to the assembly of the healed. The church’s founding documents outline a mission “to teach and preach the gospel to all people, conduct evangelistic activities, license and ordain ministers of the gospel, provide religious, charitable and humanitarian services, provide programs and assistance in fighting opioid addictions.”
Smith said he formed the business as a church because it was the easiest way to grow across state lines. “You’re just exempt from a whole lot of stuff,” he said.
By the following summer, Smith’s partners were gone. He now controlled the company, which offered Suboxone prescriptions written by a cadre of licensed doctors, nurse practitioners and psychiatrists the business enlisted as contract workers.
Smith chose Dr. Henry Emery of North Carolina to serve as medical director. He and Smith had something in common: Months earlier, one of Emery’s patients had died from a cocktail of drugs he prescribed, according to records from the North Carolina Medical Board. The year before going to work for Smith, Emery gave Medicare patients more oxycodone than 98 percent of prescribers in the nation, Medicare data shows.
Almost from the start of Emery’s partnership with Smith, he wrote more prescriptions for buprenorphine than the DEA allowed, federal investigators’ records show.
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