Doctor at pain clinic sentenced to 18 months in prison

Roanoke, Virginia – The Office of the Attorney General reports that a doctor in North Carolina has been sentenced to eighteen months in jail.

Wendell Lewis Randall, 71, of Millers Creek, North Carolina, was sentenced for conspiring with others to use a Drug Enforcement Administration (DEA) registration number issued to another person. He was also ordered to pay $205,000 in fines and forfeiture. Wendell Lewis Randall was assigned to several pain clinics in Virginia, but he was rarely physically present at any of them.
In November 2023, Randall entered a guilty plea to conspiring to use a DEA registration number that belonged to someone else to distribute and dispense prohibited narcotics, according to the Office of the Attorney General.

Court records show that from 2017 to 2020, Randall, a physician with his practice in North Carolina, was connected to L5 Medical Holdings, an LLC that was conducting business as Pain Care Center, a chain of pain clinics with locations in Christiansburg, Woodlawn, Lynchburg, Madison Heights, and Blacksburg.

According to the attorney general’s office, he was assigned to the Woodlawn clinic but was only infrequently present there. Randall was not present in the Christiansburg or Madison Heights clinics either. However, he permitted unlicensed medical professionals to prescribe Suboxone (buprenorphine) under his name using his DEA registration number, even though he had never seen the patients who were prescribed the medication.

Text conversations and other court records reveal that L5 paid Randall to use his DEA registration number. These messages revealed that Randall was not accepting patients at L5’s clinics and that he was aware that his agreement with L5 was unlawful.

Additionally, according to court records, Randall was frequently cautioned by his peers that his methods of prescribing Schedule II narcotics were inappropriate. For renting out his DEA credentials and for allegedly supervising nurses that he neglected to oversee, Randall was paid more than $300,000.

The third defendant to be punished concerning L5’s pain clinic operations in western Virginia is Randall.