West Bloomfield doctor pleads guilty in federal court to illegally distributing drugs

A West Bloomfield physician faces at least 44 months in federal prison after pleading guilty this week to illegally distributing more than 7,000 oxycodone pills, including monthly prescriptions for a patient who was incarcerated for three years.

Scott Henry Cooper, 61, is scheduled to be sentenced on Aug. 24, 2023, in U.S. District Court for the Eastern District of Michigan, U.S. Attorney Dawn Ison said.

Cooper pleaded guilty to a drug charge in exchange for a sentencing agreement with federal prosecutors. Under the deal, he faces a minimum sentence of 44 months in prison and a maximum of up to 87 months, according to Ison.

Officials with the U.S. Drug Enforcement Administration accused Cooper of prescribing drugs such as oxycodone, hydrocodone, methadone, Xanax and Adderall for patients without seeing them when he was a physician at the Comprehensive Medical Associates clinic in West Bloomfield from 2013 through 2018.

"A doctor who supplies a patient with addictive and dangerous controlled substances without assessing the patient’s need for the drugs endangers the patient and the community," Ison said in a statement.

In one instance, Cooper wrote monthly prescriptions of oxycodone for a patient who was in prison over a three-year period that started in 2017. Investigators said Cooper prescribed the drug without examining the patient or determining if it was necessary. A relative of the patient would pick up the prescription at the clinic's front desk. Officials estimate Cooper prescribed more than 7,000 doses of the drug for the patient while incarcerated.

Authorities said Cooper told them he didn't like treating controlled substance patients, but his employer required him to, and admitted to prescribing drugs to them without seeing them first.

"Dr. Cooper’s actions were reckless and criminal," Orville Greene, Special Agent in Charge with the Detroit Field Division of the Drug Enforcement Administration, said in a statement. "This type of negligence by medical personnel is what fuels addiction."

Cooper was indicted in June 2020 for illegally prescribing controlled substances, resulting in the death of a patient. Federal prosecutors alleged he wrote more than 20,000 prescriptions for controlled substances, totaling over 800,000 dosage units from March 31, 2014, to Dec. 31, 2018. Officials said the street value of the pills he prescribed was in excess of $5.5 million.

Officials said in 2020 that Cooper's patient who died was killed by a methadone overdose on June 18, 2015. Cooper prescribed the patient 478 pills of 10 milligrams of methadone the previous day, they said.

Cooper was also charged with 22 separate counts of illegally prescribing controlled substances to several different patients.

The physician was banned from prescribing any controlled substances since June 2020 as part of his bond set by the court.

cramirez@detroitnews.com

Twitter: @CharlesERamirez