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Fairmont doctor pleads no contest in drug case

Exponent Telegram file photo by Matt Harvey Dr. Edita Milan, who had an office in Bridgeport, has pleaded no contest to five felony charges involving illegally prescribing narcotics.
Exponent Telegram file photo by Matt Harvey
Dr. Edita Milan, who had an office in Bridgeport, has pleaded no contest to five felony charges involving illegally prescribing narcotics.

CLARKSBURG, W.Va. — A Fairmont doctor will be sentenced in about three months after she pleaded no contest to five federal felony drug-related charges stemming from her Bridgeport opioid dependency clinic.

U.S. District Judge Irene M. Keeley accepted the no-contest pleas from Dr. Edita Milan at the request of her lawyers, Steve Jory and Belinda Haynie. It marked the first time in Keeley’s career of nearly a quarter century on the federal bench that she’s accepted no-contest pleas. The pleas were made without benefit of a plea agreement.

But the judge, at the request of assistant U.S. Attorneys Andrew Cogar and Sarah Wagner Montoro, painstakingly went through whether Milan acknowledged facts behind the charges that were testified to for over an hour Tuesday by the commander of the Greater Harrison Drug and Violent Crimes Task Force.

That included the commander’s testimony that Milan prescribed a potentially lethal mix of opiates and Xanax to one of her patients — a neighbor of hers who was found dead June 8, 2013. The death escalated an investigation into the Philippines-trained doctor and her Bridgeport clinic.

The commander also testified — and Milan didn’t dispute — that she gave an abnormally high dose of buprenorphine to a patient shortly after he’d been weaned off drugs during an extended hospital stay. Milan acknowledged to the court that she should have known that the patient had been dried out; he died of an overdose just three days later, the commander testified.

As to the commander’s testimony that Milan had 39 of 97 patients at one point on a potentially lethal mix of benzodiazepines and suboxone, Milan wouldn’t admit to that exact number. But she agreed that a large number of her patients at that time were on such a mix…

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