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Valerie Wigglesworth, Staff Writer
A longtime McKinney doctor who prescribed large amounts of drugs without a legitimate medical reason was sentenced to 120 months in federal prison this week.
Randall William Wade prescribed more hydrocodone — a highly addictive opioid — than any other doctor in Collin County in 2015, according to federal investigators.
In addition to his 10-year prison sentence, Wade must pay a $50,000 fine along with a $1,000 special assessment.
He pleaded guilty last year to one count of possession with intent to distribute and distribution of controlled substances. The drugs included hydrocodone, alprazolam, also known as Xanax, a muscle relaxant called carisprodol and amphetamine salts.
A federal prosecutor called the combination of those drugs “the equivalent of prescription heroin.”
Wade also pleaded guilty to nine counts of money laundering and aiding and abetting. Those charges involved more than $227,000 derived from his unlawful activity.
The plea also includes forfeiture of more than $181,000 in cash.
At the time of his October 2016 arrest, federal investigators had linked Wade to at least six overdose deaths. The Texas Medical Board had found he operated an unregistered pain management clinic. And several pharmacies had refused to fill his prescriptions because of all the red flags.
“Eighty-eight percent of his practice is devoted to writing of prescriptions that he shouldn’t be writing,” assistant U.S. attorney Heather Rattan said at an October 2016 hearing after his arrest.
“This defendant is a clear danger to the community,” she told the judge at the time.
The U.S. Attorney’s Office for the Eastern District of Texas declined to comment after the sentencing.
Wade’s defense attorney did not return calls for comment.
Wade practiced family medicine at the Medical Center of McKinney located along Central Expressway. During that October 2016 hearing, his wife described him as a country doctor whose practice over 30 years included a lot of poor farming folks.
“He’s not a pill mill or anything like that,” Sharon Lippincott-Wade testified at the time. “He genuine [sic] cares for these people.”
Between January 2014 and April 2016, Wade prescribed more than 1.5 million hydrocodone pills, according to federal testimony.
One employee at his practice told investigators that “Wade doesn’t try to find out what the problem is [with his patients]. He just writes scripts.”