New York has one of the nation’s toughest laws on prescription drug abuse, but a Team 12 Investigation has uncovered an apparent loophole.

The opioid epidemic went unchecked for years until one shockingly violent incident in 2011. On Father’s Day, David Laffer shot four people in cold blood before stealing prescription pain pills from a Medford pharmacy.

The tragic shooting amid the growing opioid crisis led to landmark legislation in New York. In 2013, the I-STOP Act, or Prescription Monitoring Program, was signed into law. It created an online drug database to track prescription pain pills and give officials an early warning sign of possible fraud or abuse.

The law has been credited with saving countless lives. It prevented patients from doctor-shopping and allowed the state and pharmacies to see who over-prescribed highly addictive pain pills. Since then, many doctors have been caught, arrested and jailed.

Yet, a Team 12 Investigation uncovered how a former Nassau County doctor went undetected in the I-STOP database for at least year, prescribing hundreds of pills to one patient that he knew didn’t need them.

A state Department of Health spokesperson told News 12 that “pharmacies are not mandated to inform the state” when they stop filling a doctor’s prescriptions out of concerns for drug abuse.

Our Team 12 Investigation uncovered that this is a potential loophole in what’s considered one of the toughest prescription drug abuse laws in the nation.

According to federal prosecutors, Alan Nelson was prescribing oxycodone to such an extent that, in 2020, Rite Aid pharmacy informed Nelson it would no longer fill prescriptions from his office out of concerns of abuse.

Nelson continued to prescribe at least 92,700 milligrams of oxycodone to one patient “for no legitimate medical purpose,” according to court documents, throughout the next year.

Advocates who fought for the law more than a decade ago were stunned by what we showed them.

“If a physician is being flagged for potentially overprescribing and harming an individual or family and they were sent a letter and the doctor didn't adhere to statewide prescribing regulations, it's unacceptable and there needs to be consequences for that, that need to be immediate,” said Steve Chassman, executive director of the Long Island Council on Alcoholism & Drug Dependence (LICADD).

Teri Kroll has been on the front lines of Long Island’s opioid crisis ever since her son died from an overdose in 2009. He became addicted to pain pills pushed by a doctor.

Kroll has been an advocate for other families ever since and our reporting made her realize the job isn’t done.

“So now what that's telling me as an advocate is we have to open this up and find an amendment to this law,” Kroll said. “They're still committing the crime, so we have to make that law even tougher. You're bringing out the fight in me!”

Republican state Sen. Dean Murray, of East Patchogue, led the fight to pass I-STOP. He said he is now looking into whether pharmacies should be mandated to alert the state if they have concerns of abuse after our Team 12 Investigative report.

“That’s something we need to look into, is where do we go from here,” said Sen. Murray. “Do we take that next step to maybe ask that it is a mandate? That when you notice something like this, you report it to the Department of Health or to authorities right away? That is something that I’ll be looking at and talking to my colleagues about looking into.”