DEA suspends Cardinal Health's Lakeland facility's license
— -- Federal authorities on Friday suspended a major health care company's license to sell powerful prescription pain killers and other drugs from its Florida facility after linking it to unusually high shipments of the controlled drugs to four pharmacies.
Cardinal Health, a $1.3 billion health care services company, said Friday it would go to court to reverse the U.S. Drug Enforcement Agency's suspension of its controlled substances license at its Lakeland, Fla., distribution center, which services 2,500 pharmacies in Florida, Georgia and South Carolina.
"We believe the DEA is wrong," Cardinal CEO George Barrett said in a statement on the company's website.
The administrative action comes as the DEA is cracking down on pill mills, rogue doctors and shady pharmacies that divert the highly addictive pills, such as oxycodone, to drug dealers.
"This is still an ongoing investigation," said DEA Special Agent David Melenkevitz, spokesman for the Miami Field Division. "We will be able to provide more information on Monday."
In its suspension order, the DEA alleges that Cardinal knew or should have known that the four retail pharmacies inappropriately filled prescriptions.
The company called the DEA action a "drastic overreaction" that would disrupt delivery of critical medications to hospitals and pharmacies in three states.
Cardinal has "extensive processes" to prevent diversion of its pharmaceuticals for illegitimate use, Barrett said. Cardinal's internal controls have flagged more than 160 pharmacies in Florida and 350 pharmacies nationwide for "suspicious order patterns," he said. Barrett said the DEA is holding the company responsibly for a part of the supply chain it does not control.
"At the time we filled these orders, the pharmacies held valid state board of pharmacy and DEA licenses," Barrett said in a call to investors on Friday. "Pharmaceutical distributors do not influence the manufacture of controlled medicines. We do not write prescriptions. We do not dispense controlled medicines, nor do we license pharmacies. Our role is as a distributor, a critical link in the supply chain between pharmaceutical manufacturers and pharmacies."
Friday's action is the third time in five years the DEA has suspended Cardinal's controlled substances licenses. Previous incidents include:
•In November 2007, the DEA suspended the controlled substances license for Cardinal's Auburn, Wash., distribution facility for selling 18 million hydrocodone pills in nine months to retail drug stores. The company sold 605,000 pills to one drug store in Burlington, Wash., over a seven-month period, the DEA said.
•In December 2007, the DEA suspended the license for Cardinal's Lakeland distribution center for selling large amounts of controlled substances, particularly hydrocodone, to illegal Internet pharmacies.
In 2008, Cardinal payed $34 million in fines to settle charges that it failed to report suspicious orders of hydrocodone by pharmacies operating on the Internet. Cardinal's conduct allowed "the diversion of millions of dosage units of hydrocodone from legitimate to non-legitimate channels," the DEA said.
In August 2005, DEA officials had warned Cardinal about their excessive sales of hydrocodone drugs, such as Vicodin, to online pharmacies filling illegal prescriptions.
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