A Houston-area physician was sentenced to more than 12 years in prison on Tuesday for issuing prescriptions for over 3 million\u00a0opioid pills from her Kingwood medical clinic, according to court documents.<\/p>\n
Maryam Qayum owned and operated Recare Health Clinic, a \u201ccash-only pill-mill\u201d where she sold controlled substance prescriptions to drug dealers, law enforcement officials alleged in an indictment. She surrendered her medical license and law enforcement shut down her clinic in June 2025.<\/p>\n
Qayum pleaded guilty to one count of drug conspiracy in a plea agreement that dismissed 12 additional counts on Tuesday. She was sentenced to 151 months \u2014 a little over 12.5 years \u2014 in prison, with three years of supervised release.<\/p>\n
Jon May, Qayum\u2019s attorney, declined to comment. Federal prosecutors did not respond to requests for comment.<\/p>\n
From 2022 to 2025, Qayum\u00a0issued prescriptions for over 4,000 pounds of converted drug weight, from which she obtained about $143,000, according to court documents. Qayum was the sole prescriber at Recare.<\/p>\n
Law enforcement officials alleged Qayum and four other employees intentionally and unlawfully distributed controlled substances including oxycodone, hydrocodone and carisoprodol, according to the original June 2025 indictment. Cases against the other employees were closed in June and July.<\/p>\n
\u201cQayum used her status as a licensed physician, her DEA Registration Number, and her medical practice Recare, to knowingly and intentionally prescribe controlled substances \u2026 knowing the prescriptions were not for a legitimate medical purpose and were being issued outside the usual course of professional practice,\u201d the indictment reads.<\/p>\n
The indictment alleges Qayum often prescribed a \u201chighly addictive and dangerous combination\u201d of drugs.<\/p>\n
\u201cIt was well known that the combination of high-dose opioids, including oxycodone or hydrocodone, and carisoprodol, significantly increased the risk of patient intoxication and overdose,\u201d the indictment reads.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"A Houston-area physician was sentenced to more than 12 years in prison on Tuesday for issuing prescriptions for…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":399622,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[7],"tags":[56,58,57],"class_list":["post-399621","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-houston","tag-houston","tag-houston-headlines","tag-houston-news"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-tx\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/399621","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-tx\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-tx\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-tx\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-tx\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=399621"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-tx\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/399621\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-tx\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/399622"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-tx\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=399621"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-tx\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=399621"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-tx\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=399621"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}