ALEXANDRIA, Va. (DC News Now) — The U.S. Attorney for the Eastern District of Virginia said Friday that a grand jury returned an indictment against a primary care doctor from Arlington County who distributed tens of thousands of oxycodone pills illegally.
Federal prosecutors said Kirsten Van Steenberg Ball, 68, ran a medical practice out of her home in Arlington and that she conspired with her office manager to hide the fact that she gave huge amounts of oxycodone to patients for nearly a decade, even though there was no legitimate medical reason to do so.
The indictment says the office manager, Candie Marie Calix, 40, of Front Royal, used a fake name to conceal that she, herself, was a patient of Ball. The indictment goes on to accuse Ball of prescribing roughly 50,000 oxycodone pills to Calix over the course of about 10 years.
The indictment states that the Virginia Department of Health Professions (DHP) investigated Ball in 2015 and, again, in 2021, but despite the investigations, Ball didn’t change her prescribing practices.
The indictment gave the following examples of Ball’s prescriptions:
- Prescribing a patient as many as 360 oxycodone 30-mg tablets per month;
- Prescribing similarly high quantities of oxycodone to close family members;
- Paying a patient to perform manual labor on Ball’s home while concurrently prescribing the patient oxycodone, ostensibly for long-term pain;
- Loaning a patient $40,000 while concurrently prescribing the patient oxycodone;
- Continuing to prescribe oxycodone to patients after they failed drug screens.
The U.S. Attorney’s Office said the charges against Ball were conspiracy to distribute oxycodone and 21 counts of distribution of oxycodone. If Ball is convicted, she faces a maximum penalty of 20 years in prison on each count.
Calix was sentenced to seven years in prison in September 2022 for conspiring to distribute oxycodone.
