Medical Drugs for Pharmacy Health Shop of Medicine (Photo credit: epSos.de)
Peter Andrey Smith | American Prospect | August 1, 2013
Pharmacy robberies have spiked in large part thanks to illegal demand for OxyContin. A look inside the drugmaker’s efforts to protect its product and the pharmacists at the front lines.
On a Wednesday afternoon this spring, with overcast skies and gas-slicked puddles on Utopia Parkway, some two hundred pharmacists gathered on the fourth floor of St. John’s University in Jamaica, Queens, for the Fifty-Fourth Annual Dr. Andrew J. Bartilucci Pharmacy Congress. The plainclothes professionals sat around tables draped with red tablecloths, sipping plastic cups of coffee and occasionally glancing at their phones.
At approximately two o’clock that afternoon, John P. Gilbride, Caucasian male, five foot six, medium build, clean-shaven, wearing a dark suit and glasses, entered a rear door of the room carrying a leather satchel. He stood with his head down before walking to the lectern and opening a PowerPoint presentation. Four massive bulls-eyes were splayed out on the conference room walls. “Pharmacy robberies and burglaries are taking place across the country at an alarming rate,” he said. “Do you talk about it? Do you prepare for it? We all had fire drills as kids. The same thing goes for pharmacy robberies.”
No one stirred. Gilbride talked as if he’d given the talk before. He flipped to a schematic of what appeared to be a Rite Aid in an anonymous Florida parking lot, notable only for its lack of “Twenty Percent Off” ads in the front windows. “The walls,” he said. “What are they made of? Is it easy for someone to cut a hole and break in from the gift shop next door?” He said he’d seen drugstores with netting installed in the drop ceiling. “It’s just an idea,” he said. “Just some things to think about.”
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