George Otto was a doctor who hadn’t paid his taxes and needed to earn extra to get square with the Canada Revenue Agency. Shereen El-Azrak was a pharmacist trying to provide for extended family in Canada and Cairo. As Brett Popplewell reports at Toronto Life, the pair worked with two drug-addicted dealers to purvey Fentanyl on the street in Ontario, Canada, at $350 CDN a patch, putting addicted Canadians at risk of overdose and death. And the reason? Simply to pad their own pockets.
He’d turn on his computer and write patient charts before his first appointments started filing into the clinic at around 10 a.m. He often treated as many as 80 people in a 10-hour shift. Then, after he was done seeing patients for the day, he’d begin his other work. The work no one could find out about. The work that would destroy his life, along with hundreds of others.
At some point after teaming up with Otto, El-Azrak brought him a new proposal. In recent months, she’d developed a lucrative side hustle, dispensing fraudulent fentanyl scripts. She worked with a few other doctors, who would write the scripts and pass them to drug dealers, who would sell them on the street. He could earn as much as $9,000 per week if he came on as a primary partner. Otto, no stranger to gaming the system, quickly agreed.
In June 2015 alone, Otto took home $33,000 from the scheme. The cash helped pay for the extravagant life he’d set up for himself and his family. It kept his jacuzzi hot and his Lexus fuelled. He had no idea who was using those fentanyl patches in Sudbury, who was overdosing, who was dying. Those people were so far removed from the life he’d built that they didn’t matter to him at all.
