Federal agents served search warrants at San Ysidro Pharmacy in Montecito’s Upper Village on Wednesday, but it’s unclear what the Drug Enforcement Agency is investigating, and the business was open as usual the next day.
“We are open,” pharmacist Andrea Dominic said Thursday. “And, you know, we’re pretty much in the dark about what this is all about. They just took some records from us and said it was an ongoing investigation.”
Dominic said pharmacy staff decided to close Wednesday while they were getting investigators what they requested, since they didn’t want to be doing that while filling prescriptions for customers. The pharmacy is located at 1498 E. Valley Road.
DEA spokeswoman Nicole Nishida confirmed that an administration inspection warrant was executed at the pharmacy at 9 a.m. Wednesday by the Los Angeles Field Division, but she would not release any details.
“This is an ongoing federal investigation,” she said in an email.
There is a pending accusation against the pharmacist in charge, Raymond Hoyt, from the state Board of Pharmacy, but it is unclear whether it is related to the federal investigation.
The Board of Pharmacy accusation was first filed in 2017, and an amended accusation was filed in September.
Some of the allegations are related to the pharmacy filling prescriptions from Dr. Julio Diaz, a Santa Barbara physician linked to 11 patient overdose deaths, but others involve Hoyt compounding medications that were not FDA approved for use in the United States, and illegally issuing prescriptions.
San Ysidro Pharmacy settled two malpractice suits, in 2011 and 2014, brought by family members of deceased patients alleging improper management and dispensing of controlled substances that resulted in their addition and death. Those prescriptions were written by Diaz, who was convicted and sentenced to prison for overprescribing opioid pain medications.
Three other local pharmacies were defendants in the same malpractice cases and settled: Sansum Clinic Pharmacy Inc. and its owner, Steven Cooley; the Medicine Shoppe and pharmacist Sanjiv Ballah; and L.M. Caldwell Pharmacy and pharmacist Peter Caldwell, who later surrendered his license and closed the business.
Abdul Yahyavi of L.M. Caldwell Pharmy and Cooley also surrendered their licenses.
The Board of Pharmacy revoked the Medicine Shoppe’s license and Bhalla’s license in 2018, but stayed his revocation and instead put him on probation for four years.
By filling some of Diaz’s prescriptions, San Ysidro Pharmacy and Hoyt “ignored and/or failed to appropriately respond to numerous warning signs or red flags that should have put a reasonable and prudent pharmacist on notice that prescriptions for patient AM may not have been legitimate,” the Board of Pharmacy accusation claims. It’s signed by Executive Director Anne Sodergren.
For a 27-year-old patient identified as AM, who died in 2011, red flags included the man paying for medications mostly in cash, filling narcotic pain prescriptions at multiple local pharmacies, and having the nonspecific diagnosis of chronic back pain.
The Board of Pharmacy accusation — and malpractice lawsuit — also alleged that San Ysidro Pharmacy failed to access the CURES reporting system.
Hoyt is also accused of unlawfully manufacturing and selling misbranded drugs by compounding domperidone in 2015, which a subscriber alert that same year said “was not FDA approved for any use in humans in the United States” and was not allowed to be compounded.
The allegations of illegally issuing prescriptions and issuing false prescriptions are related to claims that he prescribed and dispensed hormone replacement medications for which he did not have a valid DEA registration.
Hoyt “practiced as an advanced practice pharmacist without obtaining certification as required” in more than 1,000 instances between 2017, when the first accusation was filed, and 2018, according to the second amended accusation filed last year.
He was prescribing and dispensing the bio-identical hormone replacement medications under the authority of a collaborative practice agreement with Long Beach physician Dr. Bjorn Eek from 2014, according to the accusation.
However, in a 2018 declaration, “Dr. Eek stated that he did not see, examine or review charts for any of the patients issued the subject 1,403 prescriptions by respondent Hoyt, and stated that he did not authorize the subject prescriptions — and had never prescribed medications for the patients identified in the subject prescriptions.”
— Noozhawk managing editor Giana Magnoli can be reached at gmagnoli@noozhawk.com. Follow Noozhawk on Twitter: @noozhawk, @NoozhawkNews and @NoozhawkBiz. Connect with Noozhawk on Facebook.