Urofollitropin

The former director of pharmacy at New York City's renowned Columbia Presbyterian Medical Center is serving out a year-and-a-day prison sentence for selling cancer medicines and other prescription drugs he had stolen from the hospital's pharmacy.

Harry Morelli, 54, of Putnam Valley, N.Y., illegally sold prescription drugs to drug wholesalers from about 1985 to 1993, according to evidence gathered by the Food and Drug Administration's Office of Criminal Investigations. Morelli admitted to at least 45 transactions, for which he got $3,000 to $4,000 each.

"It was not a crime of need but a crime of greed," says Stewart Magee, special agent in charge of OCI's New York field office, which investigated the case.

A former pharmacy school classmate of Morelli's who had bought some stolen drugs from Morelli in the past and was himself under FDA investigation in 1997 told FDA special agents in March of that year about Morelli's thefts. The former classmate-turned-informant said that, for at least seven years, Morelli had stolen expensive drugs from the hospital pharmacy to sell to drug wholesalers and kept 50 percent of the drugs' wholesale value for himself.

An FDA-enforced law called the Prescription Drug Marketing Act prohibits the wholesale distribution of prescription drugs by unlicensed sellers. This measure of accountability is meant to prevent consumers from getting potentially mislabeled, subpotent, expired, counterfeit, or otherwise low-quality drugs.

With the informant's help, OCI in June 1997 set up three undercover buys of Morelli's stolen prescription drugs, including the antidepressant Prozac (fluoxetine hydrochloride), the fertility drug Fertinex (urofollitropin), and the cancer drugs Lupron (leuprolide acetate) and Taxol (paclitaxel).

Each time, Morelli agreed to send prescription drugs to the informant's fictitious business, and the informant would in return pay Morelli about half of the drugs' wholesale value. The informant gave Morelli the address of a Miami mailbox store where FDA had an undercover mailbox, and Morelli sent to that address boxes containing packages of cancer and AIDS drugs, as well as some antibiotics.

In a recorded telephone conversation with the informant, Morelli called the breast cancer drug Taxol the "hottest item around here." He said he had stashed away 30 vials of it and placed an order for another shipment that wouldn't be easily traced back to the pharmacy at the hospital, which is acclaimed for its cancer treatment. The wholesale value per vial of the Taxol was $500, according to the OCI case agent who investigated Morelli.

"He resold only very expensive items with a lot of value in a small package," says the case agent. The estimated wholesale value of one shipment of 2,000 Prozac pills Morelli sent the informant, for another example, was over $4,800.

At least once, OCI found, Columbia Presbyterian bought from a wholesaler drugs that Morelli had previously stolen from the hospital.

Faced with the government's evidence of his illegal drug sales, Morelli pleaded guilty in April 1998 to the wholesale distribution of drugs without a license.

In sentencing Morelli in September 1998, District Judge Allen Schwartz of the U.S. District Court for the Southern District of New York in Manhattan said the pharmacist had abused his position of trust at the pharmacy and jeopardized the lives of cancer patients who took the resold drugs.

In addition to his prison sentence, the court ordered Morelli to pay a $30,000 criminal fine, $58,000 compensation to Columbia-Presbyterian Hospital, and about $9,000 reimbursement to FDA for the cash the agency laid out for the undercover buys. Morelli also gave up his license to practice pharmacy.

Tamar Nordenberg is a staff writer for FDA Consumer.

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