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Police catch drug-seeker at Wal-Mart

June 22, 2006

Stanford might seem like a sleepy little place where out-of-town drug seekers can dupe the yokels into filling bogus prescriptions for controlled substances, but it isn't.

In what could be the first step in cracking an elaborately organized drug ring running out of Louisville, Stanford Det. Barry Allen, working closely with Stanford pharmacists, arrested and jailed a Danville woman earlier this month when she tried to fill a forged prescription for codeine-laced cough syrup at the Wal-Mart pharmacy.

Erica Bownam, 21, who listed a Danville address among her multiple aliases, was arrested when she returned to the pharmacy to pick up the prescription that she had left the previous day to be filled.

When Bowman paid for and took possession of the medication, she met Det. Allen, who was standing a few feet away waiting for the transaction to occur.

Det. Allen said Bowman told him she was not taking the medicine herself but was selling it for others who were profiting from the sales. She told the detective a man was paying her $15 for each fraudulent prescription she got filled, but she failed to provide the detective with the man's name or complete physical description.

When she was arrested, Bowman was carrying an additiional seven forged scripts for the same codeine medication, Det. Allen said.

He said the woman had successfully filled similarly forged prescriptions for narcotics at pharmacies at Wal-Mart in Danville and Rite-Aid in Nicholasville.

The detective wondered how such an obvious scheme could fool pharmacists in those towns, but he was willing to give them the benefit of the doubt.

"Maybe they were very busy that day," he said.

Still, Det. Allen said, when you have a prescription written on a script pad from a hospital in one town, in the possession of a patient from another town, who is getting the medicine filled in a third town, mental alarms should go off.

The scripts found on Bowman were written on prescription pads bearing the name of Norton Hospital in Louisville and signed by a Louisville physician who, Det. Allen said, had not seen patients at Norton for five years. The signatures on the scripts were not the doctor's, the detective said, and the Drug Enforcement Agency number on the script was not the doctor's either.

However, the prescriptions were written in proper medical terminology, leading Det. Allen to suspect an organized scheme to obtain prescription drugs by fraudulent means.

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