Pharmacist gets six years for illegal drug sales

A suburban Baltimore pharmacist has been sentenced to six years in prison for illegally selling tens of thousands of prescrip- tion painkiller pills.Ketankumar Arvind Patel, 48, of Eldersburg, Md., was also ordered to forfeit $400,000 at his April 9 sentencing, The Associated Press reported.

Authorities said Patel sold about 34,000 oxycodone pills to a drug dealer, who worked as an informant for the United States Drug Enforcement Administration, between July 2007 and March 2009, the AP reported. They said Patel filled hundreds of phony prescrip- tions for the informant at his Reisterstown, Md., pharmacy and also gave advice about how to forge prescriptions.

According to a DEA press release when Patel was indicted in June last year, court docu- ments alleged that the pharma- cist initially charged the inform- ant $750 cash per 60 tablets of OxyContin, but increased the price by March 2009 to $1,800 per prescription. In 2009, the informant was passing five fraudulent prescriptions per week in exchange for $7,500 in cash, the release said.

The informant purchased as many as 600 OxyContin pills per week from Patel and 200 Percocet/oxycodone pills per week using forged prescriptions, the release said. From March to June 2009, the informant made several purchases of OxyContin and Xanax from Patel while under surveillance by law enforcement authorities.

$Boopathi$, April 19, 2010