Pharmacist Nailed for Online Drug Sales
June 17, 2004 -- It's been more than three years since Francine Haight found her son's lifeless body in bed as she attempted to awaken him. She says she'll never forget the horrific discovery and she doesn't want anyone else to forget it either.
"I tried to resuscitate him," Haight said, crying. But it was too late."
Doctors found that Ryan Haight, an honor student who was barely 18, had died of an overdose of powerful prescription painkillers, a verdict that shocked his mother.
"I was just, 'Oh my God — hydrocodone, morphine, morphine. How did he get morphine?' " she recalled.
It turned out that some of the drugs that eventually killed the La Mesa, Calif., teen back in February 2001 came from nationpharmacy.com, a Norman, Okla.-based Internet drug store owned by pharmacist Clayton Fuchs, who also ran other similar Web sites.
Now Haight is asking a group of Washington politicians to get to know Ryan and his story. She is telling a Senate subcommittee about her loss during a hearing on the safety of pharmaceuticals purchased over the Internet.
Haight and her attorney, Todd Macaluso, say they believe the government can prevent such a tragedy from happening again.
Congress can pass a law that essentially provides that Internet pharmacies must follow certain strict guidelines," Macaluso said. "There must be a full disclosure of the pharmacy, pharmacist and the physicians involved, a full disclosure of the name of the company through which they're doing business and a mandatory requirement that any prescriptions issued over the Internet are issued with a valid prescription where there is a valid physician-patient relationship," he said.
Haight says the government needs to get involved in preventing easy access to drugs over the Internet because parents can only do so much. She says her family did everything in its power to control Ryan's Internet use.
Haight says she intentionally made sure the computer wasn't in her son's bedroom, so that she could monitor his online activities. Later she discovered that he had been sneaking onto the computer in the den late at night and ordering drugs, then experimenting with various combinations to get high.
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