Prosecution: Doctors charged with illegal propofol injection

The Seoul Central District Public Prosecutors` Office said Sunday that it arrested three heads of clinics, including a pain medicine doctor, in Seoul’s affluent Gangnam district, and booked without arrest two doctors and two nursing assistants on the charge of violating the Narcotics Management Act.” They are suspected of injecting propofol, addictive anesthetic, to addicts. Sixteen including bar workers are also charged with illegal injection of propofol.

According to prosecutors, the three medical professionals injected their clients with propofol illicitly as if the latter were undergoing skin and plastic surgery from 2011 to late last year. One of the doctors reportedly provided injections as many as 360 times.

Those clinics even used to close business during summer vacation, and ran so-called “Propofol Day,” which they gave propofol injections to addicts for two consecutive days, while denying ordinary patients. They charged 100,000 won (88.38 U.S. dollars) per 10 mL of propofol, which originally costs meager thousands of won (several dollars). According to prosecutors, addicted bar workers were indebted several hundred million won (hundreds of thousands of dollars) as they spent most of their monthly earning of some 20 million won (17,675 dollars) for propofol injection. Ordinary private clinics annually spend 10,000 to 20,000 mL of propofol, but the clinics in question consumed up to 100,000 mL a year.

verso@donga.com