Pharmacist convicted, suspended for stealing drugs due to addiction

CBC

3 days ago

A Winnipeg pharmacist has been convicted of fraud and reprimanded by his profession's regulatory body after years of taking drugs from his pharmacy to feed his own addiction.
Manitoba's College of Pharmacists gave Scott Putz an 18-month suspension and ordered him to pay a $15,000 fine, plus $10,000 for costs of the investigation, for stealing stimulants for his own consumption.
Details of the case were revealed in a spring edition of the regulator's newsletter.
The regulator's decision came in 2025 because it was forced to pause its investigation while a police investigation took place.
Winnipeg police charged Putz in 2021 with fraud over $5,000. In late 2023, he was given a suspended sentence after pleading guilty to the charge.
Court documents say that in 2021, Putz met with College of Pharmacists of Manitoba staff and admitted he had taken controlled substances from the pharmacy for his own consumption.
Putz told the college he had been doing that for about three or four years and "advised that he was suffering from substance abuse issues," the court documents say.
The investigation found evidence that the medication Putz took included stimulants sometimes used to treat ADHD, such as amphetamine and dextroamphetamine.
When that came to light, the college suspended Putz's pharmacist licence on an interim basis.
After the criminal charge was dealt with, the college resumed its investigation in February 2024.
The college's investigator found video footage from March 2021 showing Putz taking medication from the safe at the pharmacy where he worked, placing it into a paper bag and taking it to the front of the pharmacy, where he then counted out medication and placed it in his pocket, the college's disciplinary decision says.
Putz was handed an 18-month suspension from practice but was credited for 17 months spent in an interim suspension from 2021-23.
His pharmacist's licence was reinstated in April 2024 with additional conditions. They included submitting to regular drug and alcohol screening, working limited hours, being monitored by a pharmacy staff member and attending biweekly counselling sessions.
When contacted by CBC News, he declined to comment on the case.
The College of Pharmacists of Manitoba said it can't comment on cases beyond what's stated in published decisions.
Neely Hammerberg, communications co-ordinator for the college, did say the case highlights addiction issues in the pharmacy profession.
"We encourage any registrants who may be struggling with addiction to prioritize patient safety and to reach out to [the college] for support and guidance," Hammerberg wrote in an email to CBC.
Fentanyl prescription mix-up
Two other disciplinary cases were also posted in the college's spring 2025 newsletter.
In one of the cases, a Manitoba pharmacist was disciplined over a prescription mix-up.
Instead of a patient getting a fentanyl lollipop, as prescribed by a CancerCare doctor because it provides intermittent doses, the patient was given fentanyl patches, the decision says.
The patches result in continuous delivery of fentanyl every hour, which can be dangerous in a patient who hasn't developed a tolerance for it.
"Such a dose per hour can be dangerous or even fatal," the December 2024 decision says.
The label for the prescription was prepared by a different pharmacist, but the decision says the disciplined pharmacist, who was on duty when the prescription was picked up, should have reviewed the prescription and provided counselling to the patient. If he'd done so, the errors could have been caught.
The pharmacist was required to pay a fine of $1,500, plus $3,000 for investigative costs. Through his lawyer, he declined to comment on the case.
Patient goes without medication
In the third case in the college's most recent newsletter, a pharmacist was disciplined for an error that resulted in a patient going without necessary medication for more than two months.
Because of that, the patient had to undergo a series of procedures to save their transplanted kidney from rejection, including an emergency kidney biopsy.
In 2021, the pharmacist signed off on a kidney transplant patient's prescriptions for anti-rejection medications as having been from a prescriber at St. Boniface Hospital, when in fact the prescriber was at Health Sciences Centre.
As a result of the error in location, when the patient needed a prescription refill a year later and the disciplined pharmacist no longer worked at the pharmacy, the pharmacy sent the request to the clinic at St. Boniface, the college disciplinary panel found. The person had never been a patient at St. Boniface.
Jennifer Sokal, the pharmacist's lawyer, told CBC her client had entered the correct information for the prescriber, but the prescriber's profile showed an address for a hospital where the prescriber no longer worked.
Sokal said it's not clear why the clinic didn't advise the pharmacy that the prescriber no longer worked there, which is what would normally happen.
When the HSC clinic contacted the patient for a routine followup appointment, the patient had not taken the medication for more than two months, the decision says.
At a January 2025 hearing, the pharmacist admitted to the allegations in the case, and admitted to other disciplinary charges, such as failing to take all reasonable steps to prevent loss or theft of narcotics and controlled drugs.
He was fined $3,500, plus ordered to pay $4,000 for costs.
The decision says he "showed great remorse for his involvement" in the kidney transplant patient's negative health outcome.
The discipline panel recognized that the pharmacist was in a "very stressful situation," because the owner of the pharmacy was away on medical leave, putting the pharmacist into the role of pharmacy manager without enough training or guidance, the decision says.
The COVID-19 pandemic also was raging in 2021 and 2022 when events in the case unfolded, resulting in the pharmacist losing a family member and being "unable to grieve properly," it says.
The pharmacist responded to CBC's request for comment in an email from his lawyer to say he was a junior pharmacist at the time and new to pharmacy management.
"There were immense pressures on pharmacists during this time at the height of the COVID-19 pandemic and, after working as the pharmacy manager for three months, I made the decision to step back from the role," he said.
"I was distressed when I learned of my errors. I am very sorry for the errors I made when I was a novice pharmacy manager and for the impact any of the errors may have had on any patients."
Since the events in the case, the pharmacist has undergone significant training and has been a pharmacy manager since 2023 without incident, he said.