Pharmacy implicated in pill bust

When Kayla Gerdes, an unlicensed 18-year-old driver, ran over 69-year-old Hempstead doctor Rebecca Twine Wright in a van, killing her as she worked in her garden, no one could have predicted that the resulting investigation would focus on a pharmacy in Baldwin. But last week, Nassau County District Attorney Kathleen Rice announced the arrest of Baldwin Pharmacist Lutful Chowdhury, 61.

According to a statement from Rice’s office, Chowdhury, who lives in Westbury but works at the Aim Pharmacy on Grand Avenue, stands accused of “filling dozens of prescriptions for addictive painkillers, despite knowing that the prescriptions he was filling were forged and written on stolen prescription pads.”

Chowdhury was charged with 14 counts of second-degree criminal possession of a controlled substance, and faces up to seven years in prison if convicted. Rice told reporters that her office’s investigation of Chowdhury “began shortly after the arrest of Kayla Gerdes in April 2010, after Gerdes, while high on painkillers, ran over and killed a Hempstead woman.” Rice disclosed that Gerdes claimed to have obtained painkillers by filling forged prescriptions at Aim Pharmacy.

An investigation into the pharmacy, carried out by the federal Drug Enforcement Agency’s Diversion Team and members of the D.A.’s Street Narcotics and Gang Bureau, determined that Chowdhury, owner and supervising pharmacist of Aim Pharmacy, had filled “at least 87 prescriptions for painkillers he knew were forged on stolen prescription pads,” Rice’s statement read. Chowdhury allegedly filled the prescriptions “for at least five customers besides Gerdes,” and they were for medications like oxycodone and fentanyl patches — a powerful painkiller prescribed to terminally ill cancer patients.

The investigation also concluded that Chowdhury regularly filled several prescriptions per week for certain customers that far exceeded their needs, and never questioned them or confirmed the prescriptions with the doctors who were supposed to have written them. Chowdhury allegedly accepted only cash payments for these transactions.

“This defendant is nothing more than a drug pusher in a lab coat,” Rice said. “Kayla Gerdes was able to easily obtain the drugs that contributed to the tragic death of an innocent woman because Mr. Chowdhury was more interested in easy cash than in doing his job.”

Chowdhury was arraigned on June 3. His bail was set at $10,000, and he is due back in court on June 16.

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