Medical Board Investigates Chain of Valley Stores

The California Medical Board is investigating a chain of San Fernando Valley stores where state investigators purchased and later confiscated prescription drugs allegedly being sold without a doctor’s authorization.

Authorities last month served search warrants at six stores owned by Santa Elba Perez of Northridge and confiscated a wide variety of controlled substances, including antibiotics, tranquilizers, oral contraceptives, steroids, injectable drugs and narcotics, state investigators said.

Earlier, investigators had posed as customers and bought drugs without a prescription, court records show.

The investigation was triggered by several complaints stretching to last year, including one by a Van Nuys physician who reported that a patient was sold drugs without a prescription.

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No charges have been filed against Perez, according to the Los Angeles County district attorney’s office and the state attorney general. The medical board in court papers alleges that she violated federal and state laws by selling pharmaceutical drugs without a license to customers without prescriptions, felony crimes punishable by up to five years in jail, according to the state attorney general’s office.

Perez declined to comment on the state’s investigation.

Authorities say Spanish-speaking residents have long relied on unlicensed neighborhood drug sellers, including many in the San Fernando Valley. Many Latino immigrants are accustomed to buying over-the-counter drugs in their home countries that require a prescription in the United States.

Some of these neighborhood boticas, or drugstores, provide legal home remedies that range from ginger root tea to scented candles. But according to authorities, many of the shops, which advertise in Spanish-language publications, also sell prescription drugs manufactured and purchased legally in Mexico and then smuggled into this country.

The stores provide potentially deadly alternative medicine for the working poor who lack medical insurance or the money to seek physician services, said Renee Threadgill, the medical board investigator in charge of last month’s raids. “A lot of these individuals don’t have a health plan and they don’t have money to spend on getting a doctor so they try to medicate themselves,” she said.

Threadgill said several people have died over the past several years from using prescription medicines purchased at swap meets in Southern California.

“If you don’t have a [FDA approved] labeling requirement, how do they know what they are really getting? How do you know what you’re getting is not adulterated or broken down and contaminated?” she said.

Threadgill also expressed concern that parents may accidentally harm their children by giving them inappropriate medicines.

When her 3-month-old son was sick with flu-like symptoms, a 27-year-old North Hollywood woman told two Times reporters that she bought dexamethasone, a steroid, from an unlicensed physician who advertised at a local grocery store.

The drug is used to treat croup but can have dangerous side effects if used improperly, said Dr. Lawrence Menzer, a Van Nuys pediatrician.

Menzer said he informed the medical board of one of the medicine stores in the Valley after learning from one of his patients that antibiotics were being sold without prescriptions.

Even antibiotics can have dangerous side effects if used improperly, Menzer said. The drugs can throw off blood tests that detect potentially fatal illnesses, Menzer said, or mask the symptoms of meningitis or septic bacteria in the blood.

Buying prescription drugs without a physician also adds to the burgeoning problem of resistance to antibiotics, which lose their effectiveness if overused, Threadgill said.

“We’re becoming immune to antibiotics, that’s why they require a prescription,” she said.

U.S. Drug Enforcement Administration and U.S. Customs officials in San Diego said they do not keep track of the amount of prescription drugs confiscated at the border. But both agencies say the smuggling of such drugs is a widespread problem.

The Food and Drug Administration has issued guidelines, enforced by Customs, to regulate the legal passage of prescription drugs over the border.

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Travelers are required to declare any medicine they are carrying and must show border guards their prescriptions. Only a 90-day supply of FDA-approved drugs can be brought into the United States.

But authorities say the law is often flouted by the many U.S. residents who travel to Mexico to purchase medicines more cheaply.

Last month, a father and son who allegedly ran an unlicensed medicine shop in San Diego were arrested for possession of thousands of pills of Rohypnol--the “date rape” drug banned in this country, a DEA spokesman said.

According to authorities, the pair bought the pills in Mexico, where the drug is still sold legally.

“It goes on all the time,” said DEA spokesman Rod Adams. He added that prescription drug smuggling increased during the 1980s, after the United States banned the use and sale of muscle-building anabolic steroids, which were easily available in Mexico.

Bobbie Cassidy, a U.S. Customs spokeswoman, said the smuggling of legal Mexican drugs into the United States is done mostly by small-time operators. She believes that local store owners may themselves be bringing in small quantities of drugs for sale.