A man who fraudulently obtained and sold 2,400 oxycodone pills by having others pass fake prescriptions at pharmacies in the Portland metro area was sentenced Tuesday to four years in federal prison.
Chase Adam Conway, 36, would send women into the pharmacies to fill the bogus prescriptions, getting 90 to 180 pills at a time, according to prosecutors.
Agents from the Drug Enforcement Administration tracked Conway’s car in the fall of 2018 and found he had been using the DEA registration numbers of multiple medical doctors without their knowledge, according to Kemp Strickland, an assistant U.S. attorney.
Conway also obtained medical prescription paper, used his printer to place the doctors’ names and their DEA registration numbers on the prescriptions and provided his so-called “runners” with phony IDs to secure the pills.
“Mr. Conway was in charge of this ring of people he sent into these pharmacies across the metropolitan area,” Strickland said. “He was the one really benefiting from obtaining the oxycodone and the subsequent redistribution.”
Conway’s lawyer Robert Hamilton, an assistant federal public defender, said his client’s crime was driven by a long-term addiction to opiates and methamphetamine, something he’s struggled with for more than 16 years.
Yet his arrest in this case has “probably saved his life and others, too, and he recognizes that,” Hamilton said.
Conway told U.S. District Judge Michael H. Simon: “Everything I’ve ever been in trouble for was a direct result of my drug and alcohol addiction.”
“In my mind, I thought I was helping out friends that were involved. I could give them free pills. They’re not going to have to rob people, not going to have to sell their bodies,” he said.
Once Conway was sober, he said he realized that “all I was doing I was enabling their addiction. I’m genuinely sorry for that.”
-- Maxine Bernstein
Email mbernstein@oregonian.com; 503-221-8212
Follow on Twitter @maxoregonian