CVS Pharmacy Inc., has agreed to pay $3.5 million to resolve allegations that 50 of its stores, including several on Cape Cod, violated the Controlled Substances Act by filling forged prescriptions for controlled substances — mostly painkillers — more than 500 times between 2011 and 2014.
“Pharmacies have a legal responsibility to ensure that controlled substances are dispensed only pursuant to valid prescriptions,” U.S. Attorney Carmen Ortiz said in a prepared statement. “When pharmacies ignore red flags that a prescription is fraudulent, they miss a critical opportunity to prevent prescription drugs from entering the stream of illegal opiates on the black market. Diverted painkillers are contributing to the devastating opioid epidemic in our Commonwealth.”
This settlement, which Ortiz is calling one of the largest to date involving federal allegations of prescription drug diversion in Massachusetts, resolves two investigations of CVS stores initiated by the Drug Enforcement Administration.
The DEA was receiving an increased amount of calls reporting forged oxycodone prescriptions, according to Ortiz’s office. In the first investigation, the DEA identified forged prescriptions filled 403 times at 40 CVS stores in Massachusetts and New Hampshire. In the second investigation, the DEA identified 120 forged prescriptions filled at 10 CVS stores in and around Boston. Together, the “diverted pills” were valued at more than $1 million, according to the statement.
In July 2015, a Barnstable County grand jury returned 13 indictments against Esperanza Mata, of South Chatham, for allegedly forging fake prescriptions at eight pharmacies between December 2012 and January 2014 in the towns of Dennis, Orleans, Barnstable, Yarmouth and Harwich.
Mata, who once worked at a dentist’s office on the Cape, pleaded not guilty in Barnstable Superior Court to 12 counts of obtaining a drug by fraud and one count of conspiracy to violate the Controlled Substances Act.
The statement from Ortiz office identifies one person only as “E.M.” and said that person signed a dentist’s name on 131 prescriptions for hydrocodone and had them filled at eight CVS stores. A source familiar with the investigation confirmed the “E.M.” investigated is Mata.
One of those stores, at 134 Patriots Way in South Dennis, filled 29 forged prescriptions for her in six months, totaling 1,290 pills of hydrocodone, or seven pills a day, according to Ortiz’s office.
At a different CVS store, “E.M.” was able to fill 28 prescriptions that she had forged for herself and three other alleged patients even though the prescriptions were identical except for the patient name and even though E.M. presented some of the prescriptions just days apart. CVS also filled 107 prescriptions that bore the dentist’s Massachusetts address, even though, by then, the dentist had closed her Massachusetts practice and moved to Maine, the statement says.
Mata is scheduled to return to Barnstable Superior Court for a possible disposition in her case on July 8, according to Tara Miltimore, an attorney and spokeswoman for the Cape and Islands District Attorney’s Office.
A spokesman for CVS didn’t answer a question about obtaining a full list of Massachusetts pharmacies that filled forged prescriptions.
“To avoid the unnecessary expense, inconvenience or uncertainty of further legal proceedings, the Company has entered into agreement with the United States Attorney’s Office for the District of Massachusetts and the Drug Enforcement Administration to resolve allegations concerning certain controlled substance prescriptions that were filled at some CVS Pharmacy stores in Massachusetts between 2011-2014,” Mike DeAngelis wrote in a prepared statement. “Since the covered time period, we have implemented enhanced policies, procedures and tools to help our pharmacists properly exercise their corresponding responsibility to determine whether a controlled substance prescription was issued for a legitimate medical purpose before filling it.”
No pharmacists were terminated over the suit, according to Elizabeth McCarthy, a spokeswoman for Ortiz.
In addition to the $3.5 million settlement, which must be paid in the next 10 days, CVS has entered into a three-year compliance agreement with DEA that requires the company to maintain and enhance programs it has developed in recent years for detecting and preventing diversion of controlled substances, according to the settlement agreement between the two parties.
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