What Happened
A pharmacist and a pharmacy technician used two pharmacies the pharmacist owned in the Phoenix, Arizona area to process fraudulent prescriptions and distribute more than 200,000 oxycodone and hydrocodone tablets into the community.
From September 2014 until their arrest in July 2017, the pair also diverted thousands of alprazolam tablets and more than 13 gallons of promethazine with codeine.
What the Record Shows
Convicted of conspiring to distribute controlled substances and conspiring to launder drug-trafficking proceeds; the pharmacist was sentenced Nov 28, 2018, to 120 months in prison, and the technician was separately sentenced to 48 months in prison.
Why It Matters for Diversion Programs
This entry comes from a primary source rather than a federal enforcement release, and it is recorded as reported: Processed fraudulent prescriptions through two pharmacies to distribute over 200,000 opioid tablets and thousands of alprazolam tablets into the community. Board and news records are a lagging indicator - by the time a licensing authority or a reporter learns of a diversion, the diversion was normally detected internally first, which makes each entry a signal that inventory reconciliation, waste observation or dispensing oversight failed earlier.