21

The Pharmacist · The Doctor

2010–2011 . . . Tumpati gets spooked . . . Schultz gets raided

Even for the doctors and pharmacists who believed it was legal, working for RX Limited always had a too-good-to-be-true feeling about it. The money was too good, for too little effort. There were too many patients, with too little vetting. There were too many holes in the system itself, like an "Approve All" button in RX Limited's software that allowed doctors to accept hundreds of patient questionnaires at the same time. Occasionally, their doubt surfaced in emails to company representatives like "Ron Oz," in which they double- and triple-checked that someone was making sure it was all on the right side of the law. And then, all around the country, that doubt turned to fear as the DEA began poking at mom-and-pop pharmacies who had joined the network and doctors who were prescribing for it, hinting that a reckoning was imminent.

For Prabhakara Tumpati, that moment arrived in 2010, when he received a letter from the Pennsylvania Board of Pharmacy, the body that regulates prescription drugs at the state level. The board had taken note of Tumpati's thousands of prescriptions for RX