Federal prosecutors have just landed the first criminal conviction of a digital-health platform’s leadership for unlawful controlled-substance distribution, ending a years-long arc that began with a Silicon Valley pitch deck and ended with 40 million Adderall pills, $14 million in fraudulent insurance reimbursements, and at least one dead patient. The case offers a rare, document-rich look at how a pandemic-era regulatory shortcut became a venture-funded business model — and how thinly the line between “digital health” and a federally chargeable pill mill can be drawn when subscription growth is the only metric that matters.
On November 18, 2025, a federal jury in the Northern District of California convicted Ruthia He, the founder and chief executive of Done Global Inc., and Dr. David Brody, the company’s clinical president, of conspiring to distribute Schedule II stimulants outside the usual course of medical practice and conspiring to commit health-care fraud. According to the Justice Department’s announcement of the verdict, He was found guilty on all seven counts charged, including one count of conspiracy to obstruct justice; Brody was convicted on six. Sentencing is pending before U.S. District Judge Charles R. Breyer, with each defendant facing a statutory maximum of 20 years on the lead controlled-substance counts.
One month later, on December 17, 2025, the government tightened the screws further. A superseding indictment named Done Global itself and a successor physician-owned professional corporation as defendants, alleging that the unlawful distribution had continued through February 2025 — long after the founders’ June 2024 arrests. The case has now become the template federal prosecutors are openly using to scrutinize the broader telehealth boom.
From Facebook Designer to Federal Defendant
Done Global was incorporated in 2019 by Ruthia He, a former Facebook product designer with no medical credentials, who had previously worked on the Facebook Portal device and the Facebook Moments app. By her own LinkedIn account, she pivoted from consumer tech to mental-health care after concluding the same product instincts could be applied to Attention-Deficit/Hyperactivity Disorder treatment. Brody, a board-certified psychiatrist, joined as clinical president and was the sole owner of Done Health, P.C., the affiliated physician-owned professional corporation that nominally issued the prescriptions.
The company launched into an unprecedented regulatory opening. In March 2020, the Drug Enforcement Administration suspended the in-person evaluation requirement of the Ryan Haight Act, allowing practitioners to prescribe Schedule II controlled substances — including Adderall, Vyvanse, and Ritalin — based on a single audio-video telehealth visit. That waiver, intended as a pandemic emergency measure, has since been renewed four times. The DEA and the Department of Health and Human Services most recently extended it through December 31, 2026, while the agency’s long-promised Special Registration for Telemedicine — which would impose audit, monitoring, and credentialing requirements on platforms like Done — remains unfinalized after more than seven years of regulatory delay.
Done’s product was simple. For a recurring monthly fee of roughly $79 to $200, a patient could complete a brief online intake, receive a 30-minute video consultation, and obtain a prescription for stimulant medication that was then routinely renewed through automated workflows. The company raised capital from name-brand Silicon Valley investors. According to public filings and reporting, Done’s backers included Craft Ventures — co-founded by David Sacks — Dave Morin’s Offline Ventures, and F7 Ventures. The pitch was a familiar one: a tech-forward, asset-light platform addressing an under-served market in mental health, with a high-margin subscription model and the potential to scale into a billion-dollar valuation.
The Anatomy of a Pill Pipeline
The June 2024 indictment describes a business architected, top to bottom, to maximize prescriptions per dollar of operating cost. Federal prosecutors alleged that He and Brody:
- Capped initial patient encounters at roughly 30 minutes and structured workflows so clinicians had limited ability to deviate from a prescribing-friendly template;
- Compensated affiliated clinicians primarily on the basis of patients prescribed, not time spent or outcomes documented;
- Built “auto-refill” functionality into the platform that minimized follow-up clinical contact and made it harder for prescribers to terminate ongoing prescriptions;
- Pushed a prescription-or-cancel framework, under which patients who were not prescribed stimulants would terminate their subscriptions and the platform would lose recurring revenue;
- Continued the model after internal warnings, regulator inquiries, and external reports — including evidence that Done members had overdosed and at least one had died.
Court documents detail one Los Angeles patient with a history of substance abuse who relapsed and died of an overdose after a Done clinician issued an Adderall prescription via the platform. Prosecutors alleged that He and Brody were aware of social-media instructions circulating online about how to game Done’s intake to obtain stimulants, and that they nonetheless persisted in the scheme — at one point making what the government called “false and fraudulent representations to media outlets” in an effort to forestall federal action and reassure pharmacy partners.
The economic picture is equally stark. According to the Department of Justice, He and Brody “conspired with others to provide easy access to over 40 million pills of Adderall and other stimulants” and that the scheme caused Medicare, Medicaid, and commercial insurers to pay more than $14 million in tainted reimbursements. The company itself collected an estimated $100 million in subscription revenue over the life of the scheme, according to filings cited by the government.
Why DOJ Treated a Tech Platform Like a Pill Mill
The Drug Enforcement Administration’s announcement of the verdict made clear what made Done Global a precedent rather than a one-off. Existing telehealth case law had typically focused on individual prescribers; the Done case, by contrast, attacked the entire corporate apparatus around the prescription pad. As attorneys at Ropes & Gray noted in a January 2026 client alert, prosecutors used California’s corporate-practice-of-medicine doctrine — the long-standing prohibition on non-physicians directing clinical decision-making — as an evidentiary predicate to argue that Done’s prescribers were not exercising independent medical judgment. In effect, the government argued, the “professional corporation” was a form-over-substance vehicle through which a venture-backed marketing platform issued controlled-substance prescriptions.
The strategy worked. Both defendants were convicted on the conspiracy and substantive distribution counts. He alone was convicted of obstruction of justice — a count tied, in part, to allegations that she made misleading statements to media outlets and pressured employees not to cooperate with regulators. The Justice Department’s case page notes that He has been in custody since arrest, while Brody has remained on supervised release. The Verrill Law analysis of the verdict labels it “the first-ever federal drug-distribution prosecution related to telehealth,” a description echoed in HHS-OIG’s enforcement bulletin on the case.
A Pattern That Should Have Been Visible Earlier
Done was not the first telehealth platform whose stimulant-prescribing practices drew federal attention. Cerebral, a far better-funded competitor that at one point achieved a $4.8 billion valuation, forfeited $3.65 million in a 2024 non-prosecution agreement after DOJ and the DEA found that the company had instituted internal practices designed to maximize controlled-substance prescriptions and patient retention. Cerebral admitted that, between February 2021 and October 2022, it had used internal performance metrics that effectively pushed clinicians to prescribe stimulants in order to keep subscribers from churning out.
What distinguishes the Done outcome is the Justice Department’s willingness to escalate from civil resolutions to felony convictions, and to pursue not just clinicians but the corporate operators who designed the platform and absorbed the revenue. The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention’s 2024 Health Alert Network advisory on disrupted access to prescription stimulants — issued explicitly in light of the Done indictment — warned providers that abrupt cessation of supply for patients of investigated telehealth companies could itself create overdose risk, an indirect acknowledgment of how deeply pandemic-era platforms had embedded themselves in the prescription stimulant supply.
The numbers underline the scale of that embedding. According to Drug Enforcement Administration production quotas and IQVIA market data summarized in federal filings, U.S. dispensing of amphetamine-class medications hit record levels during the pandemic. Done was a meaningful contributor to that volume in certain states, distributing what prosecutors estimated at more than 40 million stimulant pills via affiliated mail-order and retail pharmacies — a figure that, even accepting some imprecision, places Done in the same statistical neighborhood as a mid-sized hospital system’s entire annual stimulant footprint.
What the Case Says About the Telehealth Era to Come
The Done conviction lands at an awkward moment for the industry. Federal regulators have now extended pandemic telemedicine flexibilities four separate times, each time on the stated rationale that the agency needs more time to issue a permanent rule. Industry lobbying — including from venture-backed mental-health platforms — has consistently favored extending the waiver while pushing back on more rigorous Special Registration requirements. The result is a system that, six years on, still treats Schedule II prescribing-by-webcam as a temporary emergency measure.
Meanwhile, the same regulatory ambiguity that enabled Done is now being used by sophisticated investors as a due-diligence flag. The Ropes & Gray analysis warns that the prosecutorial theory used in United States v. He — treating platform design, compensation structure, and management influence as evidence of an unlawful distribution conspiracy — can apply to any telehealth company whose business model leans heavily on controlled-substance volume. That puts a meaningful subset of the venture-backed digital-health portfolio on notice, particularly investors who continued funding rounds after the first regulatory red flags appeared in 2022 and 2023.
The remaining question is whether the Justice Department will follow this verdict up the capital stack. Done’s superseding indictment names corporate entities; it does not, as of this writing, name individual investors or board members. Public records indicate at least three institutional venture funds collectively controlled significant stakes in Done at the time the DEA opened its investigation. Whether any of them will face civil clawback, board-level scrutiny, or merely reputational damage is the next chapter to watch — and one that will determine whether the Done verdict deters the next iteration or merely teaches it to be quieter.
For now, two convicted defendants face up to two decades each in federal prison; a venture-backed startup that once advertised itself as a mental-health revolution is a defendant in its own indictment; and an emergency telehealth rule originally meant to keep COVID-era patients connected to care is, six years later, the regulatory scaffolding that the next Done is being built on.