Anissa Maroof, a physician from Potomac, Maryland, was sentenced to 15 months in federal prison for unlawfully distributing and dispensing controlled substances. The sentence was handed down by U.S. District Court Judge Theodore D. Chuang in Greenbelt, Maryland. Following her prison term, Maroof will serve two years of supervised release, with the first nine months under home detention.
The announcement was made by Kelly O. Hayes, U.S. Attorney for the District of Maryland, along with Special Agent in Charge William J. DelBagno of the FBI’s Baltimore Field Office and Chief Marc R. Yamada of the Montgomery County Police Department.
According to her guilty plea, between January 2019 and June 2022, Maroof distributed and dispensed Alprazolam (Xanax), Amphetamine-dextroamphetamine (Adderall), and Buprenorphine outside the scope of professional practice and not for legitimate medical purposes.
Maroof owned and operated a medical practice in Bethesda and held a Drug Enforcement Administration registration number authorizing her to prescribe controlled substances. She provided prescriptions for these drugs to patients from West Virginia without warning them about the risks associated with combining such medications. In some cases, she continued prescribing even after learning that patients were selling their excess supply through illicit channels.
Investigators found that Maroof regularly prescribed controlled substances without providing therapeutic services or seeing patients in person. She called in prescriptions to pharmacies while instructing patients to leave cash payments under her office door in exchange for prescriptions. Additionally, she advised patients on how to split filling their prescriptions at different pharmacies.
U.S. Attorney Hayes commended the work of the FBI and Montgomery County Police Department during the investigation and thanked Assistant U.S. Attorneys Christopher Sarma and Elizabeth Wright for prosecuting the case.
More information about the Maryland U.S. Attorney’s Office can be found at https://www.justice.gov/usao-md and https://www.justice.gov/usao-md/community-outreach.
