Pain Management Doctor Charged With Illegally Prescribing Oxycodone

Monday, December 5, 2016 | 0

A federal indictment unsealed last week charges a Raleigh County doctor with writing illegal prescriptions for pain pills that led to three overdose deaths.

Dr. Michael Kostenko, who ran Coal County Clinic in Daniels, is accused of prescribing oxycodone to patients who didn’t need the painkiller, the Charleston Gazette-Mail reported.

Kostenko has been embroiled in a 10-year battle with authorities because he has exposed industry and political corruption, he and his lawyer, daughter Christina Kostenko, said in interviews with WorkCompCentral for a July 22 story.

The West Virginia Board of Osteopathic Medicine yanked Kostenko’s medical license June 15 after three patients overdosed on opioids while under his care. The cocktails that killed them included painkillers prescribed by other physicians with whom Kostenko did not compare notes, regulators allege.

Kostenko earlier this year repeatedly defied orders to shut down his medical clinic, the Gazette-Mail said.

“They wanted to blame someone, and my father stood up against the OxyContin fraud. That did not please the powers to be,” Christina Kostenko told WorkCompCentral in July. “These industry doctors are overdrugging these people and billing the hell out of insurance companies.”

Kostenko filed a defamation lawsuit against CBS on May 20 in Raleigh County Circuit Court and is seeking $1 million in damages for harm to his reputation, emotional distress and harassment from the broadcast on the opioids epidemic in West Virginia.

He also has a pending whistleblower lawsuit against state regulators.