A doctor of osteopathic medicine who practiced for years in Maine is accused of allowing another person to fill hundreds of prescriptions for tightly controlled drugs under his name, according to a complaint filed in federal court Tuesday.
Douglas Jorgensen, a former Maine doctor, is accused of allowing another person to use his credentials to fill more than 300 prescriptions for highly controlled drugs while Jorgensen was traveling abroad. Andy Molloy/Kennebec Journal
While Douglas Jorgensen, who operated a pain management practice in Manchester before he surrendered his Maine license in 2020, was on trips to Jamaica, England and Germany in 2018 and 2019, his credentials were being used to issue 316 prescriptions for Schedule II drugs, according to the civil complaint. Jorgensen could face a fine of up to $25,000 for each prescription, or nearly $8 million.
The Controlled Substances Act regulates how doctors prescribe drugs that have the potential for abuse or dependence. Schedule II drugs, which include fentanyl and oxycodone, are considered to have “have a high potential for abuse.”
According to court records, Jorgensen lives in South Carolina. He did not respond to a voicemail from the Press Herald asking to discuss the case.
He came under fire from other Maine doctors in 2016 after federal data revealed he had accepted more than $40,000 in payments from pharmaceutical companies related to opioids between 2013 and 2015, even as he saw patients at a recovery center for people with opioid addictions. That figure represented 60% of the statewide total.
In a January 2017 statement, he defended the payments, saying they were “no different than a computer software developer interacting with Microsoft or an oncologist seeking updates on chemotherapy from a pharmaceutical company.”
The new complaint includes few details about why prosecutors do not believe Jorgensen was seeing patients remotely and legally prescribing them drugs electronically. But according to disciplinary records from the Maine Board of Osteopathic Licensure, two of Jorgensen’s former employees filed a formal complaint in August 2019 that Jorgensen had ordered them to use his Drug Enforcement Agency license to fill prescriptions for patients without seeing them.
Jorgensen denied any wrongdoing in a Sept. 30 response. He told the board that he planned on closing his practice in just two days, that he did not plan on continuing to practice in Maine and that he was willing to voluntarily surrender his Maine license. The board accepted Jorgensen’s surrender as discipline for his distribution practices and for failing to give several patients adequate notice that he was closing his practice, according to board records.
Jorgensen was also licensed to practice in Florida until he allowed that license to lapse in 2020.
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