Four doctors in Carmel, IN, a suburb of Indianapolis, have sued the city and government officials responsible for the illegal attack on their clinic, Drug Opiate & Recovery Network (DORN), an addiction center prescribing Suboxone, in July, 2014.  The lawsuit asks for compensatory and punitive damages and requests a jury trial. Drs. Larry Ley, founder, George Agapios, Ronald Vierk, and Luella Bangura were all arrested and charged, in spite of years of continuous communication with DEA officials.  This shows the evil in the DEA.

“They destroyed the lives of 12 people that were actively trying to fight this disease, and they threw all the patients who were actively fighting addiction to the curb,” said Dr. Ley. In spite of the charges being dropped against them, or the acquittal of Dr. Ley, shedding the stigma of the raid has proved difficult for the clinic’s doctors and staff since the arrests, which is why they decided to take legal action. The employees have been unable to find other work, even though their records have been expunged.

The attorneys for the city and some of the officials have declared immunity in the lawsuit. That is the protective umbrella by which these unscrupulous DOJ officials are carrying out illegal attacks against legitimate practitioners across the country, and something we, the citizens, must remove. If a government official knowingly attacks an innocent citizen for illegal purposes, that official should be held accountable. If not, this country is moving into a police state. The plaintiffs’ claims of false imprisonment and arrest are also possibly barred due to a probable cause being filed in the case, even though that probable cause was created through perjury. Also, to show how the DOJ colludes in their illegal attacks on doctors, Assistant U.S. Attorney Josh Minkler who was first offended by the behavior of DEA agent Gary Whisenand pushing the case against Dr. Ley, is now representing Whisenand in the civil suit.

The new complaint of false arrest and violating their right to due process is against DEA agent Whisenand, the city of Carmel and Major Aaron Dietz of the Hamilton/Boone County Drug Task Force. But Dietz’s attorneys claim he was acting in good faith and is therefore immune from civil action under law. Good faith—Bull shit!! The target was picked, the case was created.

In the government’s standard propagandizing media collusion when doctors are attacked, Dietz was quoted as saying

“We make no distinction between Dr. Ley and any other drug dealer,” calling the clinic a “pill mill” and Dr. Ley “the Pablo Escobar of Suboxone.” “This type of ruse of a clinic perpetuates the problem.  Those people are still addicted to the drug and this is what’s happening.  This is not fixing the problem,” “Opiate drugs and prescription medication is a gateway to heroin.  That’s why we have heroin is because people get addicted to the opiate drug prescription medication and then go to a cheaper, readily available heroin.”

Now all of those statements are lies stated in public to defame a proper, law-abiding citizen. Shouldn’t that perpetrator of illegal activity (Dietz) have to pay for his crimes?

Dietz and Whisenand worked for months to create a case against the doctors. This is an example of tax dollars being wasted. They spent nine months watching hundreds of patients comes and go from the clinics, compiling more than 26,000 hours of video surveillance in the process. But they were unable to identify a single individual who was paying for a drug they didn’t legitimately need. So they invented some by sending undercover officers to lie about being dependent on opiates. So probable cause was a creation of the government.

Then, despite being told twice by the U.S. attorney’s office that they didn’t have a case against Ley, they arrested Ley and 11 of his employees for “providing Suboxone prescriptions to the undercover officers who had no legitimate medical need for them.”

This is a standard practice in all attacks on doctors, and primarily what they are being convicted of: “illegitimate medical practice” because the DEA agents lie to get drugs prescribed that they don’t really need. Who’s committing the crime here? But as the suspected “ringleader” of the operation Ley was booked on $1 million bond, his assets seized, and he spent a month in jail.

One by one the cases against Ley’s 11 co-defendants fell apart, as prosecutors failed to provide enough evidence that a crime had been committed. Dr. Ley was the only DORN defendant to go to trial. The charges against him applied to just 22 prescriptions for Suboxone—all written to police officers pretending to legitimately need them. That fact was not lost on Hamilton County Judge Steven R. Nation, presiding over Ley’s trial.

“I struggled with this case the minute I started to watch the surveillance videos [of the undercover agents],” Nation said, prior to announcing Ley’s acquittal. “I’ve got conditions that people were asking to be treated for [and] the drug that was issued was appropriate for what they were being asked to be treated for.”

Why aren’t more judges seeing this fact? Maybe because they ride the gravy train of convictions too?  Judges are not unbiased in these cases where money is funneled into the Department of Justice and their own courts. Ethics and morals are found less and less in the legal profession.  But at least in this case under this judge, Ley was cleared of all charges after an eight-day bench trial and all other charges against him in other counties where he ran clinics were dropped.

Jim Crum, Dr. Ley’s defense attorney stated what every defense across the country should be stating:

“Our position has been, and the judge agreed, that the judges point that if there was a violation of anything here it’s a licensing issue.” Is the doctor following the rules exactly? “Even if he wasn’t that doesn’t rise to the level of a criminal offense. There was no intent to deal, everything was in the confines of the normal practice of medicine.”

James Brainard, Mayor of Carmel

Dr. Ley was acquitted in August 2016, two years after the raid. Similar clinics across the country are being attacked and the doctors incarcerated. But here, the reason is obvious—a politically motivated effort to help developers in Carmel, directed by Mayor James Brainard. I won’t go into the possible collusion between Mayor Brainard, the Carmel Redevelopment Commission, and Pedcor here. But a detailed review of public records showed that the city had its eye on the property before Dr. Ley became a subject of a criminal investigation. In 2016, just months before the start of Ley’s trial, the city of Carmel revealed a takeover of the property across the street and construct a new mixed-use development called the “PNC Block Redevelopment” involving condominiums, commercial office space, underground parking, and an outdoor beer garden. If the goal was to force Ley out of Carmel, a conviction wasn’t necessary. DORN’s main office in Carmel never reopened, and Ley sold it for a loss to a real-estate investor.

So what is the result of attacks on legitimate clinics like this on the occurrence of addiction? Use Indiana as an example. Thanks in part to the policies of former Indiana Governor Mike Pence, treatment options in Indiana were limited even before Dr. Ley’s arrest. The state ranked 47th out of 50 states for availability of drug and alcohol treatment and Suboxone treatment was among the worst in the nation. Hamilton County ranked ninth out of 92 counties for heroin overdoses. In Indianapolis drug overdose fatalities increased seven-fold since 2000. Hamilton County alone has seen a 45 percent increase in heroin-related deaths. In 2015 more than 300 non-fatal overdoses were recorded in the four counties where Ley practiced. Two years after the closure of the DORN clinic, fatal overdoses in Indiana have risen by double digits, with only three providers certified to prescribe Suboxone in the entire city of Carmel.

Addendum

In 2019,U.S. District Judge Richard Young granted summary judgement to the city, local law enforcement and a federal Drug Enforcement Administration officer in the attack on Dr. Ley and his associates.  Basically the courts support illegal attacks on doctors because they reap the benefits when the doctors are convicted by confiscating the assets.  Our Judicial System is corrupt.  We must clean the swamp.

Second Addendum

Dr. Ley passed away in December, 2022. Acquittals don’t bring things back to normal for us. We must get the CSA repealed, stop the attacks, exonerate us all, and compensate us and our surviving families for the attacks.