Gastonia Pharmacist Sentenced for Selling

What Happened

Cole Dixon Moore, 36, a licensed pharmacist at Prescription Plus pharmacy in Gastonia, North Carolina, was sentenced in July 2025 to two years in prison for illegally distributing oxycodone and alprazolam. Court documents showed he sold at least 1,500 pills without a prescription to a customer he knew was reselling them, and he admitted stealing the pills from the pharmacy's stock. He forfeited about $20,000 in proceeds. In February, the pharmacy agreed to pay $204,000 to resolve allegations that it violated Controlled Substances Act recordkeeping requirements and failed to adequately monitor its staff pharmacist.

“Moore admitted to stealing the pills that he sold from the pharmacy’s stock supply.”
U.S. Department of Justice / U.S. Attorney's Office press release, Jul 9, 2025

Related Guidance

15 Red Flags of Drug Diversion — Behavioral and transactional indicators of diversion.
Investigation Playbook — How to investigate suspected diversion inside an organization.

Sources

U.S. Department of Justice / U.S. Attorney's Office press release, Jul 9, 2025

Case at a Glance

Setting: Retail pharmacy (Prescription Plus)
Drug: Oxycodone; alprazolam
Method: Stole pills from pharmacy stock and sold them without prescriptions
Status: Sentenced July 2025 to two years in prison plus supervised release and about $20,000 forfeiture; pharmacy paid $204,000 civil settlement in February 2025

Source: U.S. Department of Justice

What this case shows

Where this record connects to the site's working material. Links are chosen from the case's setting, drug and method fields.

Share: LinkedIn X Facebook

Last reviewed: September 2026 · Educational content, not legal advice.

About the author

DivertGuard is built and maintained by Alex Rodriguez, MHIIM, CPhT (also known as Jesus Rodriguez) — a drug diversion prevention program manager with more than a decade in pharmacy practice, including direct responsibility for a health-system controlled substance diversion prevention program.

Conference presentations

2025 — The Rounding Revolution: A High-Tech Approach to Diversion Prevention (with Emily Spiceland, PharmD)
2024 — No Pill Left Behind: Strategies for Comprehensive Drug Accountability (with Eric Andrews)
2022 — Ready for My Close Up! Implementing, Maintaining, and Expanding Drug Diversion Prevention Cameras (with Jeremy Quinn, Shawn Young, and John Bailey)

Other professional engagement

Faculty, ASHP Drug Diversion Certificate
Speaker, Health Care Compliance Association (HCCA)
Published author, Pharmacy Purchasing & Products

Credentials

Doctorate candidate — Doctor of Health Informatics (DHI), Rutgers University, School of Health Professions; research on health data analytics and the prediction of cognitive decline
MHIIM — master's in health informatics, University of Tennessee Health Science Center (2019–2021)
CPhT — Certified Pharmacy Technician, with 10+ years of pharmacy practice across retail, hospice, compounding, home-health, and hospital settings

The assessment items, weighting, and case registry behind this site come from that operational background — building and running a diversion prevention program, not from vendor marketing. Every tool here is free, requires no signup, and is based on published regulatory and professional standards (DEA, Joint Commission, ASHP, CDC).

Full author bio and credentials →

Would your controls have caught this?

The free self-assessment scores your own controls: 7 sections, 45 weighted items, a score for each section, and a PDF you can take to your committee. No account or login.

Start the free assessment

Related Resources

Diversion Settlements & Fines

Settlements, civil penalties and criminal fines paid by hospitals and pharmacies in documented drug diversion cases, with the amount, year and primary source for each

Penalty Outcomes in the Case Records

Counts of the outcomes the registry records state: prison, probation, fines, licence actions and restitution, with stated sentence lengths by band and by drug class

Registry Insights: Sentences, Fines, States and Outcomes

Sentence lengths, fines and restitution, cases per 100,000 pharmacists by state, and plea and licence outcomes, each counted from the case records with its n, plus charts of cases by year, state and drug class

Gastonia Pharmacist Sentenced for Selling Stolen Oxycodone