SAN DIEGO — A doctor who wrote prescriptions for nearly a million tablets of the painkiller hydrocodone last year has been arrested along with a pharmacy manager and 13 others in what authorities described as a strike against a ring that smuggled prescription drugs to Mexico from the U.S.
The unusual operation brought a flood of hydrocodone tablets to Tijuana pharmacies, where American addicts snapped them up over the counter on jaunts across the border from San Diego, investigators said.
Authorities speculate that it was easier for smugglers to unload large batches of pills at those loosely regulated pharmacies than to distribute them in small amounts through American street dealers.
It’s also profitable: A smuggler who buys a pill for about $2 in the United States can sell it to a Mexican pharmacy for about $3.50, and the American addict pays about $6 to bring it back home.
“We got Tijuana in the palm of our hand,” Jason Lewis, one of the accused smugglers, said in a wiretapped conversation, according to a search warrant affidavit filed in the case. “We’ve been doing this for years, bro.”
The risk of getting caught carrying drugs across the border into Mexico is minuscule. No hydrocodone pills and only 90 oxycodone pills were seized from Mexico-bound travelers at U.S. border crossings in fiscal 2009, the year before the investigation began.
The 17-month investigation resulted in the arrest Tuesday of Dr. Tyron Reece, 71, a general practitioner who runs a practice in the Los Angeles suburb of Inglewood.
About the drug
Hydrocodone pills are commonly sold under the brand names Vicodin and Lortab. Hydrocodone, nearly as powerful as morphine, caused 2,499 deaths in the U.S. from 1998 to 2002, the most recent data analyzed by the Drug Enforcement Administration.
The DEA says there were 130 million prescriptions written in 2006, up nearly 50 percent over six years.
