Dr. Howard Diamond Gets 20 Years for Opioid Trafficking

Dr. Howard Gregg Diamond, 58, of Sherman, Texas, was sentenced to 20 years in federal prison on charges of conspiracy to possess with intent to distribute controlled substances, including hydrocodone, oxymorphone, methadone, fentanyl, morphine, oxycodone, alprazolam, and zolpidem. The Plano-based pain management doctor also received a concurrent 10-year sentence for health care fraud, marking one of the harshest penalties yet for a physician tied to the opioid epidemic in North Texas.

The sentence, handed down by U.S. District Judge Marcia A. Crone, follows Diamond’s guilty plea in October 2018. From 2010 through 2017, Diamond wrote thousands of prescriptions with no legitimate medical purpose, turning his clinics in Sherman and Paris into pill mills. On July 15, 2014, he dispensed morphine, oxycodone, alprazolam, and zolpidem to a patient who died ten days later. Court records show six additional overdose deaths linked to his prescriptions.

The health care fraud charge stems from a single fraudulent Medicare claim. Diamond billed the federal program for treating a patient on September 29, 2015—while he was out of state and never saw the individual. The fraud, though isolated, added federal weight to a case defined by reckless disregard for human life. He was indicted by a federal grand jury on July 6, 2017.

Just days earlier, on May 3, another North Texas medical duo faced justice. Tad W. Taylor, 64, a former Richardson doctor, was sentenced to 20 years in prison for distributing oxycodone, amphetamine salts, hydrocodone, alprazolam, and promethazine with codeine. His wife, Chia Jen Lee, also known as Chia Jen Lee-Taylor, a registered nurse, received 188 months for the same crime. The pair operated Taylor Texas Medicine from 2010 to 2012, running it as a prescription racket with no medical oversight.

“This is the type of behavior that has resulted in the opioid crisis in this country,” said U.S. Attorney Joseph D. Brown. “The number of pills Dr. Diamond was prescribing was shocking. When doctors care more about the money they are making than anything else, people can die, and in his case, they did.” He compared the sentences to those given to street-level drug traffickers—because, in effect, that’s what these medical professionals had become.

DEA Special Agent in Charge Clyde E. Shelley, Jr. of the Dallas Field Division vowed continued crackdowns: “We have teams of investigators who work to identify doctors who over-write prescriptions, potentially causing addiction and overdoses.” HHS-OIG Special Agent in Charge CJ Porter added that corrupt physicians like Diamond fuel a national epidemic. “Dr. Diamond’s lengthy and meaningful sentence… should serve notice to others who would replace ethics with profit.”