A Beverly Hills pharmacist who supplied addictive drugs to a criminal syndicate has been banned from practising for at least six months, despite the Health Care Complaints Commission calling for a two-year suspension.
Ahmed Osman supplied pain relief medication including oxycodone and fentanyl and antianxiety drugs such as diazepam and tramadol to an unknown person in increasing quantities over a two-year period between January 2021 and February 2022. He was working at a pharmacy owned by his sister.
He met the buyer outside the pharmacy about once a month, and never handed over any quantity less than 50 boxes, in what the NSW Civil and Administrative Tribunal described as conduct “completely antithetical to his professional responsibilities”. Afterwards, he made retrospective entries in the drug register and created falsified records to ensure that stock levels could be reconciled and to avoid detection.
Osman agreed before the tribunal last month that he knew the drugs had a high street value and great potential to be abused or misused. But he claimed that he did not receive any personal benefit from the transactions, and only agreed to supply the drugs because the criminals had threatened him and his family.
The Pharmaceutical Regulatory Unit [PRU] began to close in on Osman in December 2021 when it asked him to hand over the retained duplicate for an oxycodone prescription that appeared to have been dispensed a month earlier but which the patient had not received. According to the agreed facts before the tribunal, Osman lied that the medication had not actually been distributed and deleted the dispensing record.
In February 2022, the PRU requested the prescription duplicates for OxyContin and Endone tablets for a second patient that were purportedly prescribed by a doctor.
Over the next eight days, Osman set to work retrospectively cancelling 204 transactions related to the dispensing of prescriptions. The cancelled transactions represented 6926 Endone tablets, 1660 OxyNorm tablets and 2268 OxyContin tablets that were unaccounted for. He claimed that the medication requested by the PRU had not actually been supplied and was only a price check inquiry.
When PRU officials inspected the pharmacy a few days later, Osman was not on the premises, having asked another employee at 11pm the previous night to work that day. There was no available key to the two drug safes to assess the stock.
The PRU referred the matter to the Health Care Complaints Commission, which conducted its own investigation and argued before the NSW Civil and Administrative Tribunal last month that a minimum suspension of one to two years was warranted.
The tribunal accepted that Osman and his family had been subjected to threats of violence by “unknown males” if he did not carry out their demands and that this would have been traumatic and frightening, and ruled that a one or two-year suspension would be “unduly punitive”.
But it described Osman’s conduct as “extremely serious” and said he should have reported the criminals to police.
“Over a period of two years he supplied, on 20 different occasions, very significant quantities of prescribed restricted substances and drugs of addiction knowing it was in clear breach of his obligations as a pharmacist, knowing that they would be distributed to members of the general public and knowing that there was a real risk of those people misusing those drugs and suffering serious adverse health effects or even overdose.”
It cancelled his registration as a pharmacist, setting a minimum six months before he could apply for a review.
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