October 06, 2022
The owner of Verree Pharmacy in Fox Chase, which became the largest purchaser of prescription opioids in Pennsylvania, was sentenced to 3 1/2 years in prison for filling bogus opioid prescriptions and filing false insurance claims, U.S. prosecutors said.
Mitchell Spivack, 63, of Collegeville, owned Verree Pharmacy in Northeast Philadelphia for more than 30 years, acting as the store's lead pharmacist. During his time in business, Spivack helped cultivate Verree's reputation as a "no questions asked" pharmacy for oxycodone and other opioids, according to charging documents.
Spivack and other pharmacy employees routinely filled prescriptions in wholesale quantities of high-dose oxycodone despite red flags that the drugs were not being used for legitimate medical purposes, prosecutors said.
They also allegedly submitted fraudulent claims totaling more than $450,000 to health care benefit programs, like Medicare, for drugs that were not dispensed to patients, prosecutors said. The drugs allegedly were designated in patient records as "BBDF" – an acronym for "bill but don't fill."
“In a city that has been so adversely and disproportionately affected by the opioid epidemic, Verree Pharmacy was the top retail pharmacy purchasing oxycodone in the entire state of Pennsylvania,” said Thomas Hodnett, Special Agent in Charge of @DEAPHILADELPHIA https://t.co/EpY7gY7S16
— DEAPhiladelphia (@DEAPHILADELPHIA) August 11, 2022
U.S. District Judge Harvey Battle III also sentenced Spivack to serve two additional years of supervised released and ordered him to pay $451,328 in restitution and forfeit $116,000. Spivack had pleaded guilty to charges of health care fraud and conspiracy to distribute controlled substances.
In August, Spivack and Verree Pharmacy agreed to pay $4.1 million to resolve their civil liability under the Controlled Substances Act and other federal laws. Spivack and Verree Pharmacy are barred from dispensing controlled substances in the future.
