Birmingham Physician Sentenced for Illegally Supplying Opioid Painkillers

BIRMINGHAM -- A Birmingham physician charged in May with illegally supplying controlled substances must serve four years' probation and never seek reinstatement of the license that allowed him to write prescriptions, announced U.S. Attorney Joyce White Vance, DEA Assistant Special Agent in Charge Clay A. Morris and Alabama Law Enforcement Agency Secretary Spencer Collier.

            U.S. District Judge Virginia Emerson Hopkins today sentenced PETER ALAN LODEWICK, 73, a physician at Lodewick Diabetes Center on Montclair Road, on one count of assisting someone else in acquiring the narcotic painkiller, oxycodone, by "misrepresentation, fraud, forgery, deception, and subterfuge." The judge sentenced Lodewick in accordance with a binding plea agreement he entered with the government. Lodewick had voluntarily surrendered his Drug Enforcement Agency Controlled Substances Registration in January.

Lodewick was one of three Birmingham-area physicians charged this spring as part of DEA's Operation Pilluted in Alabama, Arkansas, Louisiana and Mississippi, which focused on reducing trafficking and abuse of pharmaceuticals. ERNEST ALBERT CLAYTON, 72, a physician in Midfield, was sentenced in September for distributing methadone without a legitimate medical purpose. He received four years' probation, a $20,000 fine and was ordered to surrender his medical license and his DEA registration.

The third doctor, MUHAMMAD WASIM ALI, 51, who owns a pain clinic in Jasper, is scheduled for trial Nov. 9 in federal court in Tuscaloosa on charges of illegally distributing narcotic painkillers for other than legitimate medical purposes.

Lodewick admitted in his guilty plea that he issued prescriptions for large amounts of opiates, between May 2013 and December 2014, to two of his patients, even after learning they were pharmacy-shopping with his prescriptions. He discovered the pharmacy-shopping in May 2013 and wrote the two patients letters terminating their physician-patient relationship, but continued to write them opiate prescriptions, according court documents.

            DEA, ALEA and Internal Revenue Service, Criminal Investigation, investigated the cases. Assistant U.S. Attorney E. Wilson Hunter is prosecuted Lodewick's case.