Doctor Sentenced to 20 Years for Prescribing Too Many Pain Pills

A Beckley-area physician was sentenced to 20 years behind bars Wednesday, and will have five years of supervised release after that for prescribing too many pain killers. Eyewitness News says Dr. Michael Kostenko admitted to distributing oxycodone to more than 270 patients from his medical practice, Coal Country Clinic, in December 2013. It was a home office, and Kostenko also admitted that his staff collected $20,000 in cash from those patients and he wrote more than 370 oxycodone prescriptions, totaling more than 22,000 pain pills, without seeing any of the patients.