Federal investigation of South Florida pill mill ring raises questions about state oversight
By Jake Shore
August 4, 2025 at 6:01 AM EDT
More than a decade ago, Florida legislators passed laws to regulate so-called pill mills that once dominated South Florida and fueled the opioid crisis across the country.
The regulations slashed the number of pain clinics operating in the state. But a recent federal investigation into a South Florida opioid distribution ring highlights potential gaps in the state’s oversight.
In early June, federal prosecutors accused Dr. Sergei Margulian, 58, of Hallandale Beach, of doling out oxycodone to clients he never examined, prescribing roughly 2.9 million pills out of clinics in Broward and Miami-Dade counties between 2021 and 2024.
Court documents show the case is tied to at least two Broward-based pharmacies, two pharmacists and two patient recruiters allegedly exchanging large amounts of cash for opioid prescriptions — filled repeatedly to the same individuals. The end goal was “to generate and conceal large profits,” according to indictments.
One pharmacist has pleaded guilty and surrendered her medical license, while the others have pleaded not guilty.
WLRN set out to understand how the accused doctor, pharmacists and recruiters sold millions of pills illegally for at least three years, without the state’s two marquee pill mill laws flagging issues sooner.
The legislation, passed during the height of the pain clinic crisis in 2009 and 2010, requires Florida Department of Health oversight of registered clinics and doctors to log information into a prescription drug tracking database.
Public records obtained by WLRN show that inspections by DOH pharmacists in 2023 and 2024 reported no issues at Margulian’s clinics: Sunrise Healing Health Center, in a Davie strip mall, and Healing Health Center, across from a high school in Hialeah.
Sign that says the pain management clinic, run by Dr. Sergei Margulian, was closed on July 8, 2025. (5712x4284, AR: 1.3333333333333333)
That’s despite the Justice Department alleging, during that same period, the doctor was prescribing opioids to recruited clients “without regard to medical need.” The agency declined to comment for this story.
“ If you have four walls, a roof and clean equipment, basically you're halfway there,” Lisa McElhaney, chief operating officer of the National Association of Drug Diversion Investigators, said of the state inspections. They focus on procedural items, rather than the doctor’s prescribing patterns, she said.
The second law — the database — collects key information on patients who are prescribed opioids, but the Florida legislature designed the system to be “passive,” according to former Palm Beach County State Attorney Dave Aronberg, who recently co-authored a book called "Fighting the Florida Shuffle," about prosecuting opioid abuse-related fraud.
“They didn't want bells and whistles to go off when someone reached a certain threshold. So it's up to the doctor or the pharmacist to alert the authorities that something is amiss,” Aronberg said.
The DOH did not respond directly to a list of questions sent by WLRN, nor requests to interview the director of the state’s PDMP, but the agency instead provided a statement.
The goal of the PDMP is to “provide the information maintained in the system to health care practitioners to augment their clinical decision making,” DOH press secretary Isabel Kilman wrote.
“The PDMP does not have regulatory authority over licensees, and they do not conduct investigations into possible violations,” Kilman said.
Meanwhile, Margulian and Olushola Yusuf, a Tampa-based pharmacist accused of participating in the scheme, are out on bond and have no restrictions on their medical licenses.
Florida law does not require licensed doctors to report an arrest to the Board of Medicine, but they are required to tell them of convictions and guilty pleas.
As part of Margulian’s bond with the federal court, he was mandated to surrender his medical license. Yusuf was restricted from working in pharmacies.
No disciplinary actions show on the state’s records of Margulian or Yusuf.
Margulian declined to comment when reached by WLRN. Yusuf and her public defender did not respond to requests for comment.
The Florida Board of Medicine directs all press inquiries to DOH, which said it could not comment “on any possible cases until 10 days” after the board finds probable cause for discipline.
Pill mills’ history in South Florida
In the late 2000s, loosely regulated clinics in Broward and Palm Beach counties fueled substance abuse, illegal drug sales and death across the country, according to past investigations by media news outlets, grand juries and law enforcement authorities.
Between August 2008 and November 2009, a new pain clinic opened in Broward and Palm Beach counties every 3 days on average, a Broward County grand jury found. Four out of every 10 oxycodone pills (30 mg) in the U.S. were sold in Florida from 2009 through 2010, according to The Palm Beach Post. The Drug Enforcement Agency pinpointed South Florida as the hub for trafficking pills to other states, the Post reported.
Florida legislators were forced to act.
After a politically-fraught process, they passed a law creating a prescription drug monitoring program (PDMP), administered by the health department. The program requires doctors to log whom they prescribe opioids to and review their patient records beforehand. The measure became law in 2009 but wasn’t fully funded until two years later.
Another law passed in 2010 mandates doctors register their clinics with the state and submit to a yearly inspection. It also forbids doctors who had their licenses revoked or were convicted of a felony drug crime from running a clinic.
READ MORE: Killer Train: Brightline death toll surpasses 180, but safeguards are still lacking
The regulations worked. The number of clinics in Florida fell from more than 900 in 2009 to around 370 by 2014, according to a federally-funded report.
“We've gone from being known as the 'oxy express' to being a role model for our sister states,” a former commissioner of the Florida Division of Law Enforcement told Reuters in 2012.
Former Florida Attorney General Pam Bondi, who now serves as U.S. Attorney General, included the PDMP and subsequent prosecutions of pill mills as signature achievements on her federal biography page.
Some studies associated the implementation of the PDMP and pill mill law to less “at-risk patients” using opioids in Florida.
FILE - Gov. Rick Scott signs a law aimed at controlling the state's "pill mills" by penalizing doctors who over prescribe painkillers, tightening rules for operating pharmacies and authorizing a prescription-drug monitoring database during a ceremony at a Fort Lauderdale police station, on June 3, 2011. (3342x2212, AR: 1.5108499095840868)
The scheme
From 2020 to 2023, Betscy Kurian, of Coral Springs, was the pharmacist in charge at Chans Pharmacy Plus. The Pembroke Pines pharmacy was a pill mill, according to federal court documents related to Kurian’s guilty plea.
For years, cash-paying customers and out-of-state patients received the same “factory-like” dosages of opioids and regularly cycled through the pharmacy, the documents note.
To a licensed pharmacist, these would typically be warning signs that patients are abusing or trafficking opioids.
“One customer routinely visited Chans to fill prescriptions for several individuals for large quantities of Oxycodone 30mg, paying approximately $800 in cash per bottle,” the plea document stated.
Kurian told her boss, Yusuf, of the red flags but was instructed to continue dispensing.
In October 2024, Kurian pleaded guilty to one felony count of conspiracy to distribute and dispense a controlled substance.
“These types of pill schemes and those who profit from them rely on people who will simply do as they are told. Betscy did not design this scheme or profit from it, but she was essential and culpable because of her position as a pharmacist,” Jude Faccidomo, Kurian’s Miami-based attorney, told WLRN in a statement.
“What is important is she knows she should have known better and that is why she immediately accepted responsibility and (pleaded) guilty,” he wrote.
A date for sentencing has not been set. That same month, Kurian surrendered her medical license to the Board of Pharmacy and promised never to apply as a pharmacist again in Florida.
Feds go after alleged pill mills
Eight months after Kurian’s guilty plea, federal prosecutors went after other medical providers and alleged co-conspirators.
Olushola Yusuf, 59, of Tampa, is a registered pharmacist who ran and owned Chans, the indictment said. Yusuf also ran Striderite Pharmacy in Margate.
Yusuf worked with Saman Cala Gimenez, 53, of Tampa, who recruited patients. Patients went to the pharmacies and paid large sums of cash for their opioid prescriptions to be filled, the indictment said.
Between 2021 and 2024, Yusuf, Gimenez and Kurian dispensed around 335,000 pills of oxycodone from the two Broward County pharmacies alone, according to the indictment.
Yusuf and Gimenez have both pleaded not guilty. A lawyer for Gimenez did not respond to a request for comment. In a court filing, Yusuf invoked her Fifth Amendment right to not incriminate herself.
FILE - OxyContin pills are arranged for a photo at a pharmacy in Montpelier, Vt., Feb. 19, 2013. (AP Photo/Toby Talbot, File) (1024x683, AR: 1.499267935578331)
Out of clinics in Davie and Hialeah, Margulian worked with Damary Mendez, 53, of Miami, who recruited patients and sent the doctor “lists that contained patients' names, dates of birth, and the number of pills of oxycodone to prescribe to them,” prosecutors said. Margulian wrote them electronically.
A lawyer for Mendez did not respond to a request for comment.
While prosecutors did not directly name Yusuf and Kurian as co-conspirators, they said Margulian’s case is linked with overlapping facts and witnesses.
Margulian and Mendez have both pleaded not guilty.
Gimenez, Margulian, Mendez and Yusuf were all charged over two days in June.
One employee of a business neighboring Margulian, who did not wish to be named for fear of reprisal, told WLRN he was working when police raided Margulian’s Davie clinic in mid-June.
He saw at least a dozen police vehicles outside that day, he said. Officers then went door-to-door to businesses asking if anyone saw anything suspicious at the clinic.
The employee said expensive-looking cars came at all hours of the night to the small strip mall clinic in Davie.
Barriers to stopping ongoing opioid scams
On 2023 and 2024 inspection forms, senior pharmacists working for the DOH wrote “Yes” next to sections that claimed Margulian regularly saw his clients and administered opioids only through individualized treatment plans, according to the documents.
Before an inspection, doctors usually make sure everything is in place beforehand, according to McElhaney.
“(Inspectors are) not evaluating the viability of the information,” she said.
McElhaney, who served as a Broward Sheriff’s Office deputy and drug investigator for years, said these cases are difficult for law enforcement to pursue. They require a level of training and knowledge most police officers don’t have.
Plus, patients who receive the illicit prescriptions have little incentive to help the police, she said. Federal privacy laws also make it difficult to proactively investigate clinics.
“ Even if I believe that doctor's a bad doctor, I cannot walk in as a law enforcement officer, state or federal, and look at any patient records,” McElhaney said.
They have to be subpoenaed and the records have to show “a pattern of what would not be any type of legitimate prescribing,” she said.
During the time he is accused of prescribing nearly 3 million oxycodone pills, Margulian had an active license with the DEA to prescribe opioids to clients.
The DEA has not responded to a request for comment on when they learned about his alleged conduct.
Prescriptions assigned by Margulian and filled by the Broward pharmacies might have been caught earlier if the state’s PDMP was more “active,” according to Aronberg.
States like North Carolina, Kansas, Wyoming and Texas all have systems in place within their PDMPs to proactively flag law enforcement or medical boards when irregularities arise.
“ The state regulators should have some ability to see that there's a scam going on under their noses,” said Aronberg.
The regulations slashed the number of pain clinics operating in the state. But a recent federal investigation into a South Florida opioid distribution ring highlights potential gaps in the state’s oversight.
In early June, federal prosecutors accused Dr. Sergei Margulian, 58, of Hallandale Beach, of doling out oxycodone to clients he never examined, prescribing roughly 2.9 million pills out of clinics in Broward and Miami-Dade counties between 2021 and 2024.
Court documents show the case is tied to at least two Broward-based pharmacies, two pharmacists and two patient recruiters allegedly exchanging large amounts of cash for opioid prescriptions — filled repeatedly to the same individuals. The end goal was “to generate and conceal large profits,” according to indictments.
One pharmacist has pleaded guilty and surrendered her medical license, while the others have pleaded not guilty.
WLRN set out to understand how the accused doctor, pharmacists and recruiters sold millions of pills illegally for at least three years, without the state’s two marquee pill mill laws flagging issues sooner.
The legislation, passed during the height of the pain clinic crisis in 2009 and 2010, requires Florida Department of Health oversight of registered clinics and doctors to log information into a prescription drug tracking database.
Public records obtained by WLRN show that inspections by DOH pharmacists in 2023 and 2024 reported no issues at Margulian’s clinics: Sunrise Healing Health Center, in a Davie strip mall, and Healing Health Center, across from a high school in Hialeah.
Sign that says the pain management clinic, run by Dr. Sergei Margulian, was closed on July 8, 2025. (5712x4284, AR: 1.3333333333333333)
That’s despite the Justice Department alleging, during that same period, the doctor was prescribing opioids to recruited clients “without regard to medical need.” The agency declined to comment for this story.
“ If you have four walls, a roof and clean equipment, basically you're halfway there,” Lisa McElhaney, chief operating officer of the National Association of Drug Diversion Investigators, said of the state inspections. They focus on procedural items, rather than the doctor’s prescribing patterns, she said.
The second law — the database — collects key information on patients who are prescribed opioids, but the Florida legislature designed the system to be “passive,” according to former Palm Beach County State Attorney Dave Aronberg, who recently co-authored a book called "Fighting the Florida Shuffle," about prosecuting opioid abuse-related fraud.
“They didn't want bells and whistles to go off when someone reached a certain threshold. So it's up to the doctor or the pharmacist to alert the authorities that something is amiss,” Aronberg said.
The DOH did not respond directly to a list of questions sent by WLRN, nor requests to interview the director of the state’s PDMP, but the agency instead provided a statement.
The goal of the PDMP is to “provide the information maintained in the system to health care practitioners to augment their clinical decision making,” DOH press secretary Isabel Kilman wrote.
“The PDMP does not have regulatory authority over licensees, and they do not conduct investigations into possible violations,” Kilman said.
Meanwhile, Margulian and Olushola Yusuf, a Tampa-based pharmacist accused of participating in the scheme, are out on bond and have no restrictions on their medical licenses.
Florida law does not require licensed doctors to report an arrest to the Board of Medicine, but they are required to tell them of convictions and guilty pleas.
As part of Margulian’s bond with the federal court, he was mandated to surrender his medical license. Yusuf was restricted from working in pharmacies.
No disciplinary actions show on the state’s records of Margulian or Yusuf.
Margulian declined to comment when reached by WLRN. Yusuf and her public defender did not respond to requests for comment.
The Florida Board of Medicine directs all press inquiries to DOH, which said it could not comment “on any possible cases until 10 days” after the board finds probable cause for discipline.
Pill mills’ history in South Florida
In the late 2000s, loosely regulated clinics in Broward and Palm Beach counties fueled substance abuse, illegal drug sales and death across the country, according to past investigations by media news outlets, grand juries and law enforcement authorities.
Between August 2008 and November 2009, a new pain clinic opened in Broward and Palm Beach counties every 3 days on average, a Broward County grand jury found. Four out of every 10 oxycodone pills (30 mg) in the U.S. were sold in Florida from 2009 through 2010, according to The Palm Beach Post. The Drug Enforcement Agency pinpointed South Florida as the hub for trafficking pills to other states, the Post reported.
Florida legislators were forced to act.
After a politically-fraught process, they passed a law creating a prescription drug monitoring program (PDMP), administered by the health department. The program requires doctors to log whom they prescribe opioids to and review their patient records beforehand. The measure became law in 2009 but wasn’t fully funded until two years later.
Another law passed in 2010 mandates doctors register their clinics with the state and submit to a yearly inspection. It also forbids doctors who had their licenses revoked or were convicted of a felony drug crime from running a clinic.
READ MORE: Killer Train: Brightline death toll surpasses 180, but safeguards are still lacking
The regulations worked. The number of clinics in Florida fell from more than 900 in 2009 to around 370 by 2014, according to a federally-funded report.
“We've gone from being known as the 'oxy express' to being a role model for our sister states,” a former commissioner of the Florida Division of Law Enforcement told Reuters in 2012.
Former Florida Attorney General Pam Bondi, who now serves as U.S. Attorney General, included the PDMP and subsequent prosecutions of pill mills as signature achievements on her federal biography page.
Some studies associated the implementation of the PDMP and pill mill law to less “at-risk patients” using opioids in Florida.
FILE - Gov. Rick Scott signs a law aimed at controlling the state's "pill mills" by penalizing doctors who over prescribe painkillers, tightening rules for operating pharmacies and authorizing a prescription-drug monitoring database during a ceremony at a Fort Lauderdale police station, on June 3, 2011. (3342x2212, AR: 1.5108499095840868)
The scheme
From 2020 to 2023, Betscy Kurian, of Coral Springs, was the pharmacist in charge at Chans Pharmacy Plus. The Pembroke Pines pharmacy was a pill mill, according to federal court documents related to Kurian’s guilty plea.
For years, cash-paying customers and out-of-state patients received the same “factory-like” dosages of opioids and regularly cycled through the pharmacy, the documents note.
To a licensed pharmacist, these would typically be warning signs that patients are abusing or trafficking opioids.
“One customer routinely visited Chans to fill prescriptions for several individuals for large quantities of Oxycodone 30mg, paying approximately $800 in cash per bottle,” the plea document stated.
Kurian told her boss, Yusuf, of the red flags but was instructed to continue dispensing.
In October 2024, Kurian pleaded guilty to one felony count of conspiracy to distribute and dispense a controlled substance.
“These types of pill schemes and those who profit from them rely on people who will simply do as they are told. Betscy did not design this scheme or profit from it, but she was essential and culpable because of her position as a pharmacist,” Jude Faccidomo, Kurian’s Miami-based attorney, told WLRN in a statement.
“What is important is she knows she should have known better and that is why she immediately accepted responsibility and (pleaded) guilty,” he wrote.
A date for sentencing has not been set. That same month, Kurian surrendered her medical license to the Board of Pharmacy and promised never to apply as a pharmacist again in Florida.
Feds go after alleged pill mills
Eight months after Kurian’s guilty plea, federal prosecutors went after other medical providers and alleged co-conspirators.
Olushola Yusuf, 59, of Tampa, is a registered pharmacist who ran and owned Chans, the indictment said. Yusuf also ran Striderite Pharmacy in Margate.
Yusuf worked with Saman Cala Gimenez, 53, of Tampa, who recruited patients. Patients went to the pharmacies and paid large sums of cash for their opioid prescriptions to be filled, the indictment said.
Between 2021 and 2024, Yusuf, Gimenez and Kurian dispensed around 335,000 pills of oxycodone from the two Broward County pharmacies alone, according to the indictment.
Yusuf and Gimenez have both pleaded not guilty. A lawyer for Gimenez did not respond to a request for comment. In a court filing, Yusuf invoked her Fifth Amendment right to not incriminate herself.
FILE - OxyContin pills are arranged for a photo at a pharmacy in Montpelier, Vt., Feb. 19, 2013. (AP Photo/Toby Talbot, File) (1024x683, AR: 1.499267935578331)
Out of clinics in Davie and Hialeah, Margulian worked with Damary Mendez, 53, of Miami, who recruited patients and sent the doctor “lists that contained patients' names, dates of birth, and the number of pills of oxycodone to prescribe to them,” prosecutors said. Margulian wrote them electronically.
A lawyer for Mendez did not respond to a request for comment.
While prosecutors did not directly name Yusuf and Kurian as co-conspirators, they said Margulian’s case is linked with overlapping facts and witnesses.
Margulian and Mendez have both pleaded not guilty.
Gimenez, Margulian, Mendez and Yusuf were all charged over two days in June.
One employee of a business neighboring Margulian, who did not wish to be named for fear of reprisal, told WLRN he was working when police raided Margulian’s Davie clinic in mid-June.
He saw at least a dozen police vehicles outside that day, he said. Officers then went door-to-door to businesses asking if anyone saw anything suspicious at the clinic.
The employee said expensive-looking cars came at all hours of the night to the small strip mall clinic in Davie.
Barriers to stopping ongoing opioid scams
On 2023 and 2024 inspection forms, senior pharmacists working for the DOH wrote “Yes” next to sections that claimed Margulian regularly saw his clients and administered opioids only through individualized treatment plans, according to the documents.
Before an inspection, doctors usually make sure everything is in place beforehand, according to McElhaney.
“(Inspectors are) not evaluating the viability of the information,” she said.
McElhaney, who served as a Broward Sheriff’s Office deputy and drug investigator for years, said these cases are difficult for law enforcement to pursue. They require a level of training and knowledge most police officers don’t have.
Plus, patients who receive the illicit prescriptions have little incentive to help the police, she said. Federal privacy laws also make it difficult to proactively investigate clinics.
“ Even if I believe that doctor's a bad doctor, I cannot walk in as a law enforcement officer, state or federal, and look at any patient records,” McElhaney said.
They have to be subpoenaed and the records have to show “a pattern of what would not be any type of legitimate prescribing,” she said.
During the time he is accused of prescribing nearly 3 million oxycodone pills, Margulian had an active license with the DEA to prescribe opioids to clients.
The DEA has not responded to a request for comment on when they learned about his alleged conduct.
Prescriptions assigned by Margulian and filled by the Broward pharmacies might have been caught earlier if the state’s PDMP was more “active,” according to Aronberg.
States like North Carolina, Kansas, Wyoming and Texas all have systems in place within their PDMPs to proactively flag law enforcement or medical boards when irregularities arise.
“ The state regulators should have some ability to see that there's a scam going on under their noses,” said Aronberg.