If you’d been in a CVS in Los Angeles during 2008, you might have witnessed people coming into the store and clearing the store’s shelves of cough and cold medicines. It also might have occurred to you that they weren’t just facing a bad case of the sniffles.
According to federal prosecutors in L.A., those folks were “smurfing”: making “multiple purchases of pseudoephedrine in small amounts with the intent to aggregate the purchases for use in the illegal production of methamphetamine.” And CVS became smurfing central as those folks discovered that those stores, “unlike other large chain retail pharmacies, allowed customers to make repeated purchases of pseudoephedrine that exceeded federal daily and monthly sales limits,” the U.S. Attorney’s Office for the Central District of California says.
That big whoopsy-daisy is costing CVS $75 million in civil fines (and the estimated $2.6 million it made on the medications).
As the Associated Press reports, CVS was supposed to be monitoring and limiting how much pseudoephedrine its customers purchased. It had an automated “Meth Tracker” electronic logbook to record purchases, but did nothing to stop the smurfers (we can’t stop saying that word!) from making multiple purchases in a day.
CVS Caremark CEO Thomas Ryan said that the chain violated its own policies. “To make certain this kind of lapse never takes place again, we have strengthened our internal controls and compliance measures and made substantial investments to improve our handling and monitoring of [pseudoephedrine] by implementing enhanced technology and making other improvements in our stores and distribution centers,” he said in a statement.
The AP says CVS declined to comment on the government’s allegation that the company failed to follow up on reports from employees and store managers about the repeat purchases.
Prosecutors say the violations occurred in Nevada and elsewhere, too; this settlement covers liability in 25 states. As part of the deal, the government won’t seek criminal charges against CVS.
Image: iStockphoto
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