Esteban Campos pleaded guilty in Orange County Superior Court Wednesday to representing himself as a dentist despite having no license to practice and of stashing a large inventory of dental narcotics and other drugs.
The Buena Park 47-year-old was sentenced to 30 days in jail, five years of probation, ordered to pay restitution and $500 in fines and prohibited from offering dental treatments, consultations, or otherwise
practicing dentistry for patients for the duration of his probation.
Now spit.
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See also:
Esteban Campos Accused of Practicing Dentistry and Dispensing Meds Without a License
Bayardo Cruz, Buena Park Doctor, Has License Revoked After Using Non-FDA Approved IUDs on Patients
William Wesley Jackson, Placentia Doctor, Has Medical License Revoked After Prescribing Drugs to Himself
A conviction without the guilty plea could have had Campos dealing with, ahem, fillings in state prison for up to eight years.
As the Orange County District Attorney's office proved in Superior Court, Campos operated Steven's Dental Lab in Buena Park through last December, when the Department of Consumer Affairs Dental Board of
California received a
complaint about him. Authorities did some digging and discovered Campos had no valid license to practice dentistry. California had once registered Campos as a dental assistant, but that license expired in 2007.
Undercover investigators then posed as patients in need of dental work twice between February and March. Sure enough, Campos claimed to them to be a dentist, performing oral exams, giving diagnoses, suggesting surgery
and braces, and making a follow-up appointment. He also quoted rates ranging from $65 to $2,000–so he wasn't even an inexpensive phony dentist.
A subsequent raid of Campos' office uncovered a large cache of
controlled substances and dental narcotics, including morphine sulfer,
Vicodin and Soma, as well as boxes of omeprazole, naproxen, theramine,
glucotrol, warfarin, sertraline, cyclobenzaprine, tramadol, ketogel
cream, and lidocaine. Again, Campos was not licensed to prescribe these to patients
without a license or scripts.
His deception spread to county Social Services, where Campos received more than $6,600 in food stamp benefits in 2010 by failing to report the income received in the form of dental payments by patients.
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OC Weekly Editor-in-Chief Matt Coker has been engaging, enraging and entertaining readers of newspapers, magazines and websites for decades. He spent the first 13 years of his career in journalism at daily newspapers before “graduating” to OC Weekly in 1995 as the alternative newsweekly’s first calendar editor.