Medical Board Pulls License of Laguna Doctor

The state medical board has suspended a Laguna Beach doctor’s medical license for three months for prescribing drugs excessively.

Dr. Robert A. Leslie could not be reached for comment Thursday. But according to records from the Medical Board of California, once his suspension is lifted in mid-June, the general practitioner will be monitored closely for the next five years.

In a separate action, the medical board accused Huntington Beach physician Jasmine Moini of gross negligence, unwarranted treatment and fraudulently altering medical records. The board recommended that her license be revoked or suspended if the charges are upheld at an administrative hearing.

Asked for comment, Moini said: “There’s nothing to say really. These are accusations. Anybody can accuse anybody.”

In Leslie’s case, the medical board opened a disciplinary proceeding after he was found guilty in Los Angeles County Municipal Court on Oct. 9, 1986, of excessive prescribing. He was also convicted of prescribing Valium to a person not under his treatment and “prescribing Tylenol with codeine for addicts.”

At that time, medical board documents said, Leslie was fined, placed on two years’ probation and ordered to spend 90 days in jail.

At a medical board hearing last summer, administrative law judge Rosalyn Chapman reviewed the misdemeanor convictions and concluded that Leslie “is not rehabilitated” but rather “obsessed with overturning his convictions” and so “unable to objectively evaluate his conduct which led to the convictions.”

She ordered that Leslie could resume practicing medicine after the suspension if he abstained from all personal use or possession of controlled substances. In addition, Leslie was ordered to provide free medical services to a community agency for 18 months and to take a course in drug abuse.

The charges against Moini stem from half a dozen patient visits in 1986.

For instance, when treating a patient identified only as “L.H.” for a sore throat, Moini allegedly failed to perform a proper physical exam before ordering a series of “clearly excessive lab tests” and diagnosing the patient as having “among other things, chest pain, chronic obstructive pulmonary disease . . . and a urinary tract infection.”

The medical board also asserted that Moini “committed a dishonest act substantially related to the functions and duties of a physician.”

It claimed that in January, 1987, Moini sent L.H.’s medical records to another physician. But when the medical board asked for the same records, the file it received in December, 1987, contained “supplemental information” that indicated the file had been “fraudulently” altered.