A Virginia doctor pled guilty Monday in federal court to writing prescriptions over the Internet for people he had never met or examined, as well as tax
evasion.

Acting United States Attorney Michael K. Loucks; Mark Dragonetti, Resident Agent in Charge of the Food and Drug Administration-Office of Criminal Investigations; and Susan Dukes, Special Agent in Charge for the Internal Revenue Service, Criminal Investigation-Boston (Mass.) Field Office; announced that. Dr. Torrino Jennings of Mechanicsville pled guilty to an Information charging seven counts of Introducing Misbranded Drugs into Interstate Commerce and four counts of Tax Evasion.

The Information charges that the drugs, shipments of the muscle relaxant SOMA, were misbranded as a matter of law because they were dispensed without a valid prescription.

At Monday’s plea hearing, the prosecutor told the court that had the case proceeded to trial the government’s evidence would have proven that between 2004 and 2007 Jennings issued between 50,000 and 100,000 prescriptions over the internet for SOMA and other drugs to individuals on whom he had never performed a physical examination and whom he had never met. He did so based on brief forms completed by individuals for online pharmacies.

The online pharmacies paid Jennings between $5 and $7 for each prescription he wrote based on one of these forms. Virtually no request for drugs submitted by the online pharmacies to Jennings for endorsement was ever rejected by him.

The prosecutor further advised the court at the plea hearing that Jennings knowingly and intentionally did not report to the Internal Revenue Service hundreds of thousands of dollars he was paid by the online pharmacies for issuing the prescriptions.

“Issuing prescriptions for supplies of drugs without any meaningful contact with patients or consulting physicians is not only against the law,” said Loucks, “it is a fundamental breach of the trust we all place in doctors.”

Judge Richard Stearns scheduled sentencing for November.

If convicted on these charges, Jennings faces up to five years imprisonment, to be followed by up to three years of supervised release and a fine between $100,000 and $250,000 on each count.

The case was investigated by the Food and Drug Administration-Office of Criminal Investigations and the Internal Revenue Service, Criminal Investigations, with support from the Virginia State Police, Bureau of Criminal Investigation, Drug Diversion Unit. It is being prosecuted by Assistant United States Attorney Stephen P. Heymann, Chief of Loucks’ Computer Crime Unit.