County Task Force Shuts 6 Storefront Pharmacies and Clinics

Los Angeles County authorities said Tuesday that they are using undercover operatives to crack down on storefront clinics and pharmacies selling potentially deadly medications to immigrants.

But the authorities added that there are far more such scams operating than they had suspected and that they are virtually powerless to stop all of them.

In a report to the Board of Supervisors, representatives of a new interagency county task force aimed at policing such clinics announced the recent closure of six clinics in East Los Angeles.

“We are continuing on a daily basis,” said task force member Fred Leaf, who heads the county Health Services Department’s audits and inspection division. “We are going countywide, to hit these establishments one by one.”

The problem, according to Leaf and other task force members, is that hundreds of the storefront operations are selling illegal and potentially deadly drugs to unsuspecting immigrants who lack the health insurance they need to go to doctors for treatment and prescriptions.

The six storefronts at which task force members made undercover buys were found to be providing all kinds of pharmaceuticals and medications to virtually anyone who came in and asked for them--including penicillin and other antibiotics, steroids and injectable drugs that were often administered on-site, authorities told the supervisors.

Many of the illegal medications had been adulterated, mislabeled, were past their expiration date, had been manufactured improperly or were sold for inappropriate uses, according to the report. Others, it warned, “are not allowed for use in this country even with a prescription.”

“These drugs are being sold everywhere, from liquor stores to shoe stores to butcher shops--anywhere where there is a large immigrant population,” said task force member Miguel Santana, assistant chief deputy to Supervisor Gloria Molina, whose office is assisting the undercover operations.

“Some of these drugs have not even been approved by the FDA and others have been taken off the shelves in the U.S. because of side effects,” Santana said. “Some can cause deaths and serious birth defects, and in all of these cases people behind the counter haven’t even asked if the women [asking for the drugs] are pregnant.”

Many of the drugs are particularly dangerous to pregnant women because they can cause birth defects, task force members said. Some contained poisons, such as mercury and lead.

But the task force said it remains virtually helpless to do anything about the storefront operations.

County health officials have no jurisdiction because pharmacies--legitimate or otherwise--are regulated by the state Health Services Department. And that agency has done virtually nothing to stop the practices, in part because it has only five investigators for the entire county, said the task force report and its members.

Susan Bond, the state Health Services Department’s chief supervising food and drug investigator, disagreed. She said the state has aggressively policed such storefront operations for 10 years, but that recently it has become swamped by their sheer numbers.

“The problem is there are many, many [more] stores now than there were before, because these people don’t know where else to go to get drugs,” Bond said. “You can go to Tijuana, load up your trunk, come back and be in the pharmaceutical business.”

What’s more, Bond said, the operators have become more brazen, diagnosing customers’ medical conditions and “prescribing” oral contraceptives and even experimental AIDS drugs.

The county was able to shut down the six clinics only because they were found to be selling food items without the required public health permits, which are regulated by the county.

“If we didn’t have a food violation, there is no way we could have shut them down,” said Leaf, who added that was the reason no arrests were made.

After Leaf told the supervisors that they needed to address such “enforcement voids for responding to local health emergencies,” the supervisors voted unanimously to seek changes in state law.

The supervisors will look for a local lawmaker to carry legislation to make selling such illegal drugs a felony. They also will seek to have county health officials be given jurisdiction over policing such storefront operations.

“In the meantime,” Santana said, “we will have to find creative ways to get to them.”