Prescription For Abuse, Part 2b

2 PHARMACISTS KEPT LICENSES DESPITE PROBLEMS

At 10 a.m. on June 10, a federal Drug Enforcement Administration
investigator arrived at South Shore Drug Store with a court order to
inspect its records and medications.

Located in the same Greenup County, Ky., shopping center as Dr. David
Procter's Plaza Healthcare, the drugstore filled many of the clinic
patients' prescriptions for Lorcet, Xanax and other controlled substances.

During the previous two years, the agent said in an affidavit prepared to
obtain the court order, the drugstore ''has come into possession of large
quantities of controlled substances.''

Behind the counter that morning was someone familiar to the DEA -- Bill
Skinner, who had become the store's pharmacist-in-charge May 6.

Skinner and a previous pharmacistin-charge at the drugstore have a history
of pharmacy law violations, but the state Pharmacy Board has allowed both
men to keep their licenses, records show.

Neither druggist has been accused of wrongdoing in connection with the
indictments of Procter and four other doctors who worked at his clinic. But
South Shore Drug Store is one of two pharmacies in the community that is
under investigation, according to a July statement by the FIVCO Area Drug
Enforcement Task Force, a fivecounty task force based in Ashland.

The DEA seized records from the other, Wright Pharmacy, in August 2000,
according to records in U.S. District Court in Lexington.

The DEA's previous encounter with Skinner came in 1990, when the agency
banned a Paducah pharmacy Skinner owned and operated from selling
controlled substances.

The DEA's order against Bill's Pharmacy cited expired and missing
controlled drugs, ''abysmal'' recordkeeping and filthy conditions,
deficiencies that it said ''demonstrate a cavalier attitude'' toward the law.

State Pharmacy Board inspectors had cited Skinner for violations at the
store at least three times since 1978, and in 1988, a board inspector
recommended revoking the licenses of Skinner and his pharmacy. The
inspector found numerous expired medications on the shelves and that
Skinner was not present while the pharmacy was open and had not taken a
required inventory though he claimed he had done so, on a permit application.

The board instead suspended Skinner for 30 days, fined him $2,000 and
placed him on probation for three years.

Under the terms of the probation, Skinner's license was to be suspended for
two years if he violated any federal or state regulation during the
probation period.

Less than a year later, another board inspector alleged that Skinner had
mislabeled prescriptions, refilled two without a doctor's authorization and
was not in the store when a customer received two pill bottles. Instead of
suspending Skinner's license, the board fined him $500.

Ralph Deitemeyer, the board's president at the time, told The
Courier-Journal in 1990 that the decision not to revoke Skinner's probation
''was based on the testimony we heard that day.''

Twice more in recent years, Skinner was cited for violations, when he was
pharmacist-in-charge of a Paducah mail-order pharmacy, Service Script Inc.
Each time he avoided serious punishment by the Pharmacy Board.

In 1996, he was fined $500 after an inspector said he found the pharmacy
area unlocked and non-pharmacist personnel accepting drug orders by fax and
preparing them in Skinner's absence.

Last year, a North Carolina resident complained that Service Script had
made repeated errors in filling prescriptions for her terminally ill
husband. Finding that Skinner dispensed the wrong strength of one drug and
the wrong form of another, the Pharmacy Board fined him $500 and ordered
him to complete a continuing education program on preventing medication
dispensing errors.

Michael Mone, the board's executive director, said the board considers
prior violations in deciding on the penalties to impose, but ''lots of bad
acts close together are worse than the same bad acts further apart.''

So while the 1996 violations were similar in character to those in the late
1980s, he said, the board probably didn't punish Skinner more harshly
because he had had no violations in more than five years.

Mone, who was not with the board in 1996 but worked for it when Skinner was
fined last year, said medication errors ''are of a different character''
than the earlier problems, and the action last year was ''a graded response
for that isolated incident.''

Skinner declined to talk with a reporter about his past.

Before Skinner, Jack Osman was the pharmacist-in-charge at South Shore Drug
Store from Feb. 22, 2000, until Sept. 21, 2001, according to the Pharmacy
Board.

In 1994, the board fined Osman $1,000, placed him on probation for two
years and required him to sell Osman Pharmacy Inc. after his Vanceburg
company entered a guilty plea in Franklin Circuit Court to filing false
Medicaid claims. The plea agreement required the company to pay
restitution, fines and other costs of more than $21,000. A criminal charge
against Osman himself was dismissed.

In 2000, the board reprimanded Osman after he was accused of recordkeeping
violations and filling prescriptions without proper authorization from
physicians at a Wal-Mart in Maysville.

In one case, he refilled four prescriptions for the painkiller Percocet up
to two weeks earlier than instructed by the physician, according to board
records. He filled other prescriptions after they had expired. Board
records say Osman was fired.

Mone said the board's reasons for the reprimand in 2000 were that it had
been six years since the previous case, and the violations were of a
different type.

The president of South Shore Drug Store, Terry Hall, did not return a phone
call seeking comment. Joe Wright, the owner of Wright Pharmacy, declined to
comment.