Last week KMOX News told you about the Fenton hospital where 4,000 doses of medical narcotics went missing -- including almost two gallons of liquid fentanyl. Now, the Drug Enforcement Administration says the problem is widespread.
"It can be a registered nurse, it can be a doctor, it can be a staff member, it can be a compliance person." At DEA headquarters in St. Louis, Robert Churchwell runs the group that investigates narctoics missing from hospitals, pharmacies and clinics. He says they get ten to twenty complaints a month about missing drugs. "I think we would consider anything over a hundred dosage units to be significant."
Churchwell says sometimes the thief substitutes a placebo like saline solution for the drug they're stealing, leaving the patient in need of pain relief no relief. "Most of our investigations reveal that there is some underlying issue," he adds, "there's a stress, there's death in the family, family problems."
The DEA says hospitals, pharmacies and clinics need to do a better job enforcing their protocols and have the software to audit their narcotic supplies to catch thefts.
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