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During the first nine months of the year, there were 150 arrests for drug diversion, defined by the U.S. Centers for Disease Control as the illegal use or acquisition of prescription medicines. That figure is up from 106 over the same period last year, Shapiro said Friday.
Those arrests range from cracking down on pill mills where doctors have been accused of peddling massive amounts of prescription drugs, to smaller cases in which nurses or pharmacy employees are accused of stealing drugs.
“I made it clear when I took office that combating the heroin and opioid crisis was my top priority,” said Shapiro, who’s been attorney general since January.
That fight has involved arresting, on average, 3.5 drug dealers every day, he said.
But arresting street dealers is only one front in the war, he said. With as many as four out of five addicts getting started abusing prescription drugs, the diversion of prescription drugs is a critical part of the problem, he said.
For instance, earlier this week Shapiro’s office announced that a Scranton doctor had been arrested for overprescribing 17,500 opioid pills to two patients over a two-year period.
In June, members of an Allentown drug ring allegedly used a stolen prescription pad to get $54,000 worth of Oxycodone prescriptions filled.
Also in June, a Schuylkill County pharmacy assistant was arrested on charges that she’d stolen more than 27,000 Oxycodone pills, with a street value of $565,000.
There have been smaller cases, across the state as well, including the arrest in September of Ashley Friedman, an employee at a CVS Pharmacy in Shamokin, Northumberland County. Friedman is accused of stealing more than $4,000 worth of prescription drugs, which she was selling to others in the community, Shapiro said.
There are a number of reasons for the uptick in arrests, beyond the tremendous increase in illicit drug activity connected to the opioid crisis that health officials say claim 13 lives a day in Pennsylvania in 2016.
“We’re putting more personnel and more” resources into making drug diversion arrests, Shapiro said.
Shapiro moved Deputy Attorney General Bob Smulktis to the new position of director of drug diversion at the Attorney General’s Office.
Smulktis is “to be focused like a laser beam on diversion,” Shapiro said.
In addition to the director, the attorney general’s office has 11 diversion agents spread across the state, Smulktis said.
Shapiro is planning to add more diversion agents, but the attorney general on Friday declined to specify how many.
Shapiro said that actions by the state Legislature have helped. First, the attorney general asked for and received additional funding to combat the opioid crisis. The 2017-18 state budget includes an additional $2.1 million for drug law enforcement in the attorney general’s office, an almost 8 percent increase in funding over the prior year.
Second, the state launched a prescription drug monitoring program in 2016 that makes it easier for law enforcement to recognize and respond to pill mills and other cases.
The prescription drug monitoring program “is working,” Shapiro said. “It’s an important tool and many of these arrests can be traced back to the prescription drug monitoring program.”
Smulktis said that in many cases, pharmacists have served as the front line in recognizing when patients are filling suspicious amount of prescription orders.
The drug monitoring program provides agents with a means to recognize suspicious patterns without having to wait for the pharmacists to call, he said.
Arrests aren’t the only place where the drug diversion problem is showing up.
The state’s medical boards sanctioned at least 78 doctors, dentists and pharmacists for alleged misconduct related to mishandling drugs.
That data comes from annual reports produced by the medical boards. But it’s likely not a complete number because the reports track complaints by the infraction mentioned in the original complaint, said Wanda Murren, Department of State spokeswoman. If investigators received a complaint about something else, then later determined that there was misconduct involving drug diversion it might not show up in the totals included in those reports, she said.
The Pennsylvania Medical Society has been working to do its part to fight the opioid crisis, said Dr. John Gallagher, chairman of the medical society’s Opioid Task Force.
“That’s why when we hear of a few bad apples running pill mills or involved in other forms of diversion, we’re disappointed,” he said.
“As our organization works to educate member physicians on proper opioid prescribing, we will also strongly support efforts of federal and state agencies to put those allegedly associated with illegal activities out of business,” Gallagher said.
“The overwhelming majority” of health care professionals are complying with the law, he said.
“To help them, we’ll continue our efforts with continuing medical education and supporting the use of the prescription drug monitoring system,” Gallagher said.