A Marlboro 44-year-old who admitted dealing thousands of oxycodone tablets with the complicity of a doctor who wrote bogus presciptions is handed a seven-year term in a state prison.

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Flickr User p_x_g
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David Roth pleaded guilty June 12 to a second degree narcotics distribution charge, according to New Jersey Attorney General John J. Hoffman's office. The doctor, Eugene Evans, Jr., 57, of Roselle Park, was sentenced to five years on June 26 for his guilty plea and surrendered his medical license.

David Roth (NJ Attorney General's Office)
David Roth (NJ Attorney General's Office)
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Investigators examining records in the New Jersey Prescription Monitoring Program established that the activity carried on between January 2012 and Marcjh 2014.

Evans prescribed more than 20,000 high-dose, 30-milligram tablets for more than a dozen patients he neither examined, treated nor met, authorities said.

Roth recruited people willing to lend their identities, accompanied them to pharmacies to have the scrips filled, paid Evans for the prescriptions, paid the individuals who acted as patients, and peddled the pills for $20 to $30 each, authorities said.

Eugene Evans, Jr. (NJ Attorney General's Office)
Eugene Evans, Jr. (NJ Attorney General's Office)
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In describing the egregiousness of the crime, Hoffman described oxycodone as the "gateway drug" that opens the door to opiate addiciton, heroin use, overdoses and death.

"We've put this drug dealer and the doctor who supplied him in prison, where they no longer will be able to callously profit by diverting these potentially deadly pills into the black market," Hoffman said.

Still to be sentenced is Harold Nyhus, 53, of Freehold, who pleaded guilty in April to a third-degree count of obtaining a controlled dangerous substance by fraud. Nyhus admitted filling false oxycodone prescriptions issued by Evans in his name and a second identity. Prosecutors seek a three-year prison term.

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