Williamsville pain management doctor Eugene Gosy pleaded guilty Tuesday to conspiracy to distribute controlled substances and health care fraud. A local lawyer says this plea could send a message to the medical community.

“There’s going to be fewer doctors in Western New York that are going to prescribe pain medication,” said John Elmore, an attorney in Williamsville.

Officials say Gosy and his employees at the Gosy Center issued more prescriptions for controlled substances each year than any other prescribing entity in the state. In court, Gosy admitted to writing dozens of prescriptions that were not for medical purposes. He also confessed to prescribing medication to employees and patients without adequate evaluation.

“If under his lawyer’s advice, he took a plea of guilty, then he was probably facing some substantial amount of time if convicted and I think that with the lawyers that if there was any chance that he was going to get acquitted, they would have fought tooth and nail to get him acquitted,” Elmore said.

After the plea, U.S. Attorney James Kennedy said if this makes doctors think twice before prescribing opioids, he’s satisfied. Elmore thinks that’s exactly what doctors may do.

“Doctors willing to write opioid prescriptions and those that do are going to have to be much more cautious and have a lot of safeguards to make sure that the people that get those prescriptions aren’t abusing them,” Elmore said.

Some think Gosy’s plea will help tackle the opioid epidemic but Elmore said he’s unsure of how this will impact the drug problem.

“Let’s hope it doesn’t have a ripple effect, where people are being denied access to pain medications and they’re just in pain and they can’t find any alternatives other than to go to the streets to get their drugs let’s hope that doesn’t happen,” Elmore said.