A 26-year-old Springfield woman who worked as a pharmacy technician at a chain retail pharmacy admitted, in a federal plea agreement, to stealing hydrocodone tablets over a nine-month period from late July 2014 to mid-May 2015. She was scheduled to be sentenced in U.S. District Court in July 2018.
According to the plea agreement as described by the State Journal-Register, the technician exploited a flaw in the pharmacy's prescription-drug tracking system that allowed her to dispense many hydrocodone prescriptions twice. She then pretended to sell the pills counted out for the duplicate prescriptions to her husband when he arrived at the drive-through window. The husband had not been charged at the time of the report.
The quantity involved was contested. The plea agreement stated that 20,676 hydrocodone tablets were taken; the Illinois Department of Financial and Professional Regulation, in placing her expired license in refuse-to-renew status in July 2017, cited approximately 38,000 tablets; and her defense attorney said a subsequent federal review put the number closer to 6,000. The agency declined to explain how its figure was determined.
The pharmacy chain declined to comment on the case or on whether it had changed its processes to prevent a recurrence. It was unclear from the reporting whether any of the tablets were sold on the street.