OCOEE PHARMACIST ARRESTED IN DRUG RAID

OCOEE -- Local and state authorities raided a small pharmacy Wednesday and
arrested its owner and two employees after a yearlong investigation into
the illegal sale of prescription drugs.

In the past year, agents from the Ocoee Police Department and Orange County
Sheriff's Office sent informants to the independently owned store five
times to buy the powerful painkillers oxycodone and hydrocodone, opiates
prescribed for chronic pain. Hydrocodone is the active ingredient in
medications such as Lortab and Vicodin. Oxycodone is found in such drugs as
OxyContin, Tylox, Percocet and Percodan.

Bridget Gordon, 44, owner and operator of Ocoee Drugs on McKey Street, and
employees Betty Smith Horn, 55, and Tracy Romano, 41, were booked on
hydrocodone trafficking charges. All three were being held at the Orange
County Jail on on bail of $500,000 each. The store also is known as West
Orange Apothecary.

Investigators said the trio sold drugs without prescriptions and attracted
its clientele by selling the drugs for less than drugstore chains.

"They were a criminal enterprise," said a sheriff's agent who did not want
to be identified because of his undercover work. "There were no pharmacy
labels and no record that it had been filled by a doctor. So in other
words, she was a drug dealer in a white coat."

Detective Mike Alexander, an Ocoee police spokesman, said the department
had received complaints about Gordon's pharmacy in the past four years. "We
got some sporadic tips," Alexander said.

Investigators from the West Orange Narcotics Task Force -- made up of Ocoee
and Winter Garden police officers and deputy sheriffs -- spent Wednesday
hauling boxes of prescription drugs from the store that has operated in
downtown Ocoee since at least 1995.

Inside the store, agents also recovered more than $60,000 in cash, a loaded
12-gauge Mossberg shotgun, a loaded revolver and several of the
pharmacist's guinea pigs, cats and dogs.

Wednesday's arrest is not the first time Gordon's store has run into
trouble with authorities.

An investigation by the South Florida Sun-Sentinel newspaper found that
Medicaid, the state-run health plan serving the poor, paid Gordon about
$3,390 in recent years for filling prescriptions under the name of a South
Florida doctor who died in 1995. Gordon, in an interview with the
Sun-Sentinel last year, said the store had made a clerical error and
entered the wrong billing number for the doctor.

Gordon also has been under scrutiny by the Florida Board of Pharmacy since
a New Jersey firm complained in 2001 that an audit had uncovered "numerous
billing discrepancies" at her store, the newspaper reported.

A letter by an executive of Paid Prescriptions, a New Jersey firm that
administers billing programs for insurance companies and HMOs in Florida,
said Ocoee Drugs did not have copies of 798 prescriptions it had billed.
The audit also found 94 instances in which patients denied receiving drugs
that the store billed to their insurance and 57 cases in which doctors said
they didn't write prescriptions for which the store billed.

JoAnn Carrin, a spokeswoman for the Attorney General's Office in
Tallahassee, said her agency's Medicaid fraud-control unit assisted in
Wednesday's raid. However, she would not say if her office is investigating
Gordon.

Gordon also is known to the Ocoee police. She is on probation through July
for battery on a law-enforcement officer.

In 2000 she was arrested outside her store after she kicked and struggled
with an officer who was investigating an "unknown disturbance," police
records show. In 1999, Ocoee police arrested her on charges of resisting
arrest without violence after Gordon tried to "push" past an officer during
a traffic stop of her husband. She pleaded no contest to a lesser
misdemeanor charge of assault.

Wednesday's arrests come amid upcoming public hearings on the
prescription-drug problem in Florida.

"The pharmaceutical drug use has increased because people think it's safer
to use the prescription drugs," a sheriff's agent said. "They're clean,
easier to get, [and] they don't have to go into a bad area of town. And
they can get more pills for their money."

On Jan. 26, a state Senate health committee looking into Medicaid and
overprescribing problems tied to OxyContin and other prescription drugs
will meet at the downtown Orlando Public Library. In addition, a U.S.
congressional panel will hold a hearing in Orlando on Feb. 9 to address
problems tied to OxyContin and other prescription drugs.