A 60-year-old Somerset County cardiologist has been sentenced to two and a half years in prison for illegally prescribing thousands of oxycodone pills, US Attorney Philip Sellinger has announced.
Raymond Catania, of Warren, previously pleaded guilty in federal court in Trenton to distributing oxycodone outside of his professional practice and not for legitimate medical purposes.
He was sentenced Wednesday to 30 months in prison.
Catania co-owned a private practice in Watchung, during which he issued prescriptions for the powerful painkiller to a patient and that patient’s wife, without a legitimate medical purpose, Sellinger said.
Over the course of approximately a year ending in March 2017, Catania prescribed more than 8,600 30mg oxycodone tablets to the couple.
Oxycodone is a highly addictive opioid.
Drug overdose deaths involving prescription opioids rose from 3,442 in 1999 to 17,029 in 2017, according to federal data collected by the National Center for Health Statistics.
Catania was also fined $25,000 and given three years of probation after the prison sentence.
Erin Vogt is a reporter and anchor for New Jersey 101.5. You can reach her at [email protected]
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