Dr. Philip Dean of Warrenton was sentenced Tuesday to 40 months in prison for illegally distributing opioid medications and making a false statement to Medicare.Dean, 62, also was ordered to pay restitution of over $312,000 to Medicare and Medicaid programs, according to the U.S. Attorney’s Office for the Eastern District of Missouri. Dean was sentenced by Senior U.S. District Judge E. Richard Webber.Dean operated a neurologist office on East Booneslick Road in Warrenton for more than a decade. Prosecutors said Dean lived with and had personal relations with three female patients at various times, and supplied them with narcotics while knowing they suffered from drug addiction.The doctor pleaded guilty in August to criminal charges related to two of those patients. Along with distributing the medications illegally, the U.S. Attorney’s Office said Dean admitted to lying to Medicare to help pay for the illegitimate prescriptions.Dean acknowledged in a plea agreement that the illegal prescriptions exposed the patients to serious risk of bodily injury, due to the potency of the drugs and the patients’ histories of drug problems.In the case of one patient, prosecutors said Dean knew the woman had lost a nursing license because of prescription drug abuse, and had been involved in vehicle crashes while driving intoxicated.Nevertheless, between 2015 and 2016, he allegedly prescribed her various opioid medications, including a fentanyl-based drug only intended for cancer patients. The woman does not have cancer, prosecutors said.Because the woman was using up the prescriptions too quickly, Dean repeatedly used the name of one of her family members to prescribe additional medications. He picked up at least one of those prescriptions personally, prosecutors said. Medicare paid for the falsified prescriptions.In the case of another patient, Dean issued her a prescription for the pain medication codeine after allegedly exchanging sexual text messages with her. Prosecutors said Dean issued the prescription without conducting a medical examination.“Prescription opioids serve an important purpose when used legitimately for patients suffering from chronic pain and illness,” said Special Agent William J. Callahan of the Drug Enforcement Administration. “In this particular case, we had a doctor with the power to write prescriptions misrepresenting the truth, supplying narcotics to people with serious addiction issues that he was aware of and bilking all of us who pay taxes while doing it.”Court gavel