HOUSTON -- Early Thursday morning, the first of six suspects were taken into custody. All involved in a case that took months to investigate.

One of the suspects is Hilton Rogers.

Police say he owned a pain clinic on South Post Oak. That’s where police allege he and others were involved in organized crime.

In a nutshell, they are accused of prescribing hundreds of thousands of pills for no medical purpose.

You might be surprised to hear that Houston is a distribution hub when it comes to pharmaceutical drugs like hydrocodone, soma and codeine.

Why? Because abusers of those drugs can go from one pain clinic to the next without consequences.

You see there are no doctor-shopping laws in Texas.

“Sure, they can go to as many pain clinics as they chose to,” said Harris County prosecutor Marie Primm. “As many that would prescribe them medication.”

And these clinics are not hard to find.

Primm says more often than not, the patients at one clinic never saw a doctor.

“Some days they were just seeing a medical assistant, somebody without any type of license,” said Primm.

It was an all cash business and extremely profitable police say.

So much so that the medical director for a clinic, Dr. Robert Bishop, was being paid approximately $500 an hour.

Bishop doesn't even live here. His upscale home is found inside a gated community near Dallas.

Police say he is expected to turn himself in soon.

The others arrested Thursday all were employed by the clinic. A clinic that apparently was working with four pharmacies that would fill the large amount of prescriptions.

Since the investigation began, some of those pharmacies have closed their doors.