What Happened

A Putnam County, West Virginia veterinarian and DEA registrant was ordered to pay $956,709 in civil penalties after federal investigators found she could not account for thousands of dosage units of opioids ordered for her practice.

Between March 2018 and July 2023, she ordered 14,200 dosage units of hydrocodone/acetaminophen and 1,400 dosage units of oxycodone HCL from a veterinary pharmaceutical wholesale supplier. For 2021 through 2023 she ordered substantially more hydrocodone/acetaminophen than any other individual customer of that supplier, and between January 2021 and January 2023 her oxycodone orders accounted for 74 percent of all oxycodone sold by the supplier. When investigators executed an administrative inspection warrant at her DEA-registered address, they found controlled substances unsecured throughout the property and no dispensing, purchase, or inventory records; at least 6,593 dosage units of hydrocodone and oxycodone were unaccounted for. She voluntarily surrendered her DEA registration during the warrant execution. In the following weeks she produced records claiming the opioids had been dispensed to dogs and cats before euthanasia, which investigators believe were largely fabricated — interviewed pet owners did not recall her administering the medications.

A federal judge entered a $956,709 default judgment against her, the maximum civil penalty available, for the unaccounted-for controlled substances and associated recordkeeping violations.

What Went Wrong

A sole-practitioner veterinary DEA registrant was able to order opioids far in excess of any plausible clinical need for years before a routine inspection uncovered the shortfall. Key failure points:

  • Purchasing volume was a glaring statistical outlier. Accounting for 74 percent of a supplier's total oxycodone sales over a two-year period should have triggered supplier-level suspicious-order reporting long before a DEA inspection occurred.
  • No inventory or dispensing records existed to reconcile purchases. When inspected, she could produce no DEA-required purchase records, dispensing logs, or inventory records at all, meaning there had been no ongoing internal accountability for the controlled substances she ordered.
  • Physical security was absent. Controlled substances were found unsecured in numerous locations on the property, well below the storage standards required of a DEA registrant.
  • Fabricated records were offered only after detection. Purported dispensing records tied to animal euthanasia were produced only after the inspection, and pet owners contradicted the claimed treatments, indicating the records were created retroactively to explain a shortfall rather than maintained contemporaneously.

How It Could Have Been Prevented

  • Require veterinary pharmaceutical wholesalers to apply the same suspicious-order monitoring and reporting thresholds used for retail pharmacy distribution.
  • Conduct periodic, unannounced DEA or state veterinary board inspections of sole-practitioner registrants with high-volume controlled-substance purchasing, rather than only responding to complaints.
  • Require contemporaneous, per-patient dispensing logs for controlled substances administered in veterinary practice, including pre-euthanasia sedation and analgesia.
  • Mandate secure storage (locked, access-controlled) for all Schedule II-IV substances at veterinary practices, consistent with human-healthcare storage standards.
  • Cross-check a registrant's purchase volume against practice size, patient caseload, and case records during routine DEA registration renewal.

Related Guidance

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