Two executives of a telehealth company focused on treating attention deficit hyperactivity disorder have been sentenced to prison after the start-up organized a scheme to illegally distribute more than 37 million pills of the stimulant Adderall.
The Department of Justice announced on Tuesday that Ruthia He, the founder and former chief executive of the company, called Done Global, was sentenced to six years in prison and ordered to pay a fine of $1 million.
Clinicians who worked for the start-up signed prescriptions for Adderall, a leading treatment for A.D.H.D., every 30 seconds, according to the Justice Department. Done’s executives pressured the clinicians to prescribe stimulants even to people who they did not think had the disorder. And they automatically authorized refills of Adderall, even for patients who were on involuntary psychiatric holds at the time or who had died.
The department also said the company had given Adderall to people whose mental health conditions were known to be worsened by the drug, like some with psychosis, bipolar disorder, depression and anxiety.
Dr. David Brody, who had served as the clinical president for the company, personally wrote prescriptions for 394,324 stimulant pills to thousands of patients whom he had never evaluated. He told Done employees that stimulants were like candy and prescribers at the company were like Santa Claus.
Dr. Brody was sentenced to two years in prison and was also given a $1 million dollar fine. Both executives were convicted in 2025.
Lawyers for Ms. He and Dr. Brody did not immediately respond to a request for comment.
A wave of telehealth companies capitalized on the Covid pandemic lockdowns, when many people were stuck inside, bored and scrolling. At the same time, the government relaxed restrictions on online prescriptions for controlled substances like Adderall. Done spent over $40 million on a blitz of social media advertisements, frequently featuring young people “discovering” that they had A.D.H.D.
Some ads tricked people into thinking they needed Adderall when they suffered “simply from inattentiveness due to aging or a lack of structure due to work-from-home policies,” according to a news release from the Justice Department.
Margaret Sibley, a professor of psychiatry and behavioral sciences at the University of Washington School of Medicine, said such ads “were really designed to convince the public that they might have A.D.H.D. so that they could become a potential consumer.” She added that she believed aggressive advertisements may have contributed to the rising rates of A.D.H.D. diagnoses among adults.
Another telehealth company, Cerebral, agreed to pay a more than $3.6 million penalty in 2024 for encouraging the unauthorized distribution of controlled substances like Adderall.
“The diagnosis of A.D.H.D. is actually probably the most challenging diagnosis to make in psychiatry,” said Dr. Ryan Sultan, an A.D.H.D. expert at Columbia University. Under best practices, clinicians conduct comprehensive interviews with patients and family members to help determine whether a person has A.D.H.D.
The sentences represent a warning to health companies, said Dr. John Torous, director of digital psychiatry at Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center. But the incentives that push bad actors to prioritize profits have not changed, he said.
“Sometimes industry pushes things too far and too fast,” he said. “And it doesn’t mean that it’s not useful or effective.”
“But I think that this spirit of, ‘It’s more important to grow than to understand the safety,’ kind of persists,” he added.
