I just got off the phone with the Palm Beach County State attorney’s office spokesman Mike Edmondson, and he said the filing packet was now being sent to the Miami-Dade State Attorney's Office to review for possible criminal behavior by the doctors who prescribed Rush Limbaugh Viagra.
I wrote in my first post when this story broke "Did Limbaugh’s doctor break the law ?" because I believed the doctors were engaged in unethical and possibly illegal behavior from the start.
Rush Limbaugh will not face charges in Palm Beach County for the bottle of Viagra found in his luggage that was prescribed in his doctor's name, prosecutors said Wednesday. The state attorney's office said Dr. Steve Strumwasser's name was on the Viagra bottle, not Limbaugh's. Strumwasser, who is Limbaugh's psychiatrist, told authorities he "agreed to have his name on the label in an effort to avoid potentially embarrassing publicity for the suspect," according to a filing by the prosecutor's office. " Thus, the medication contained in the subject pill bottle was legitimately prescribed to the suspect by his physician," the filing said.
Here's the part of the AP story I have a problem with:
It is generally not illegal under Florida law for a physician to prescribe medication in a third party's name if all parties are aware and the doctor documents it correctly, said Mike Edmondson, a spokesman for the state attorney in Palm Beach County. However, since the doctor wrote the prescription in Miami-Dade County, the case has been forwarded to prosecutors there for review.
I told Mike that the Medical Board did not share that opinion when I contacted them. Doctors do not write scripts in this manner. Edmondson admitted that the activity by the doctors has not gone unnoticed, but their county was unable to do anything about it because the drugs were prescribed in Miami-Dade.
The original prescription came from Limbaugh's cardiologist and then went to his psychiatrist-both of them have been treating Rush for a very long time. I told him of my conversation with the Florida Board of Medicine and that they wanted me to give them the names of all the doctors involved so that complaints could be filed. Edmondson told me that these doctors are seriously being looked at. I don't have a name of the Miami-Dade prosecutor yet, but I'll keep you up to speed.
