Swap Meet Sale : Prescription Drug Vendor Fined $1,000

The first swap meet vendor in the state charged with selling black market prescription drugs pleaded no contest Thursday to selling dangerous drugs to a Northridge woman whose ailing toddler later died.

The Los Angeles city attorney’s office, which filed the charges against Santa Elba Hernandez in June, vowed to use the case to push for closer state monitoring of such sales at swap meets.

“I’m going to be calling different agencies to see what they can do about this problem,” said Ruth Kwan, an attorney with the city’s Consumer Protection Division. “This is certainly not an isolated incident. Santa Elba is not the only one.”

Hernandez was sentenced Thursday to three years’ probation and 100 hours’ community work and ordered to pay a $500 fine. She also agreed to pay $500 for investigative costs to the Los Angeles Police Department, which arrested her and confiscated her drug inventory in June, 1987.

Maximum Term 6 Months

The crime carries a maximum sentence of six months in jail and a $1,000 fine.

After Kwan outlined the sentence in court Thursday, Hernandez, 43, said through an interpreter that she would be happy to do the work but would have a hard time coming up with the money.

Kwan filed misdemeanor charges against Hernandez last month, more than a year after the death of 2-year-old Jesse Gonzalez of Northridge. The boy died just 10 hours after his mother had a neighborhood folk-medicine practitioner inject him with a liquid purchased at Hernandez’s booth at the Sun Valley Discount Center.

The district attorney’s office ruled out felony charges in the case when the county coroner determined that Jesse had died from a lung infection unrelated to the medication, which turned out to be an antihistamine.

Unusual Drug Involved

Kwan said the case was long in coming to trial because it took several months to find an expert witness familiar with the antihistamine, a drug called Bexedan that is readily available in Mexico but rare in the United States.

State pharmacy and health officials concede that the sale of pharmaceutical drugs smuggled in from Mexico is common at swap meets around Southern California. But they also say halting that practice is extremely difficult because vendors move from place to place and because getting the drugs across the border is easy.

U.S. Customs officials at the Mexico-California border are “pretty nervous about narcotics,” said Kenneth Sain, supervising inspector with the state Board of Pharmacy, “but it’s always been pretty much hands-off at the border if you came back with 100 bottles of prescription drugs that you said were for personal use.”