Holland Doctor gets Year in Prison for Illegally Selling Percocet

A Holland doctor will do time after illegally selling the pain killer Percocet from his Trenton, N.J. office, an NJ.com article reports.

Dr. Augustine Lee, 70, was sentenced to one year and one day in prison for selling the narcotic from his office on Stuyvesant Avenue in Trenton, the article said. According to a federal criminal complaint, Lee was arrested in February 2011 after months of surveillance found that he was giving Percocet prescriptions to walk-in customers for $60. 

He allegedly dealt 40,000 tablets of prescription painkillers from the front window at his New Jersey office during 2010, which resulted in an increase of pedestrian traffic to the area, the NJ.com article explained. 

Lee admitted to illegally selling prescriptions for Percocet on Jan. 9, 2012, according to a department of justice press release. 

According to documents filed in this case and statements made in court, Lee admitted that he wrote a Percocet prescription for a patient who came to see him at his Trenton office in exchange for money in November 2010, and he did not conduct any physical examination from the patient, nor obtain any medical history.

Lee previously pleaded guilty to distributing the pain killer oxycodone without a legitimate medical purpose and outside the usual course of professional practice, officials said according to the NJ.com article. 

Judge Sheridan also sentenced Lee to three years of supervised release and was ordered to forfeit $33,000 in ill-gotten gains, the article said.

• Read the full article on NJ.com here.
• Read the press release from the United State's Attorney's Office here.