County Bid to Shut Illegal Clinics Is Off to Careful Start

Top Orange County officials gathered Thursday to start putting together a task force aimed at busting and closing illegal back-room medical clinics, but getting the operation going may take several weeks.

Supervisors Charles V. Smith and Tom Wilson said they want a “comprehensive approach” to deal with the sale of illegal pharmaceuticals, one that answers how widespread the problem is in the county.

“What we don’t want to do is to send police officers on a sweep of the Hispanic community” to shut down health clinics, Smith said. “We want to get the information out that there are free clinics out there,” where no one asks about immigration status.

The meeting was in response to the deaths of two toddlers. Selene Segura Rios, 18 months, died last week after getting an injection at a Tustin toy store, Los Hermanos Gift Shop, with what her parents were told was penicillin. Christopher Martinez, 13 months, died in April after he was injected five times by an unlicensed practitioner in Santa Ana.

Smith asked members of the Santa Ana Safe Medicine Coalition, which police helped form after the Martinez death, to speak at Tuesday’s Board of Supervisors meeting.

“We want them to tell us what they’ve done on their efforts so far,” Smith said, “and to give us a plan of action. We’ve also asked them to identify their budget requirements to implement a plan for the county.”

County officials want to put together a task force much like the ones that Los Angeles County formed in September and Santa Ana police launched last spring.

The task forces include federal, state and local law enforcement agencies, as well as the citizens group in the Santa Ana operation.

While the smaller city effort now operates on a case-by-case basis, the larger Los Angeles County task force continues to conduct sweeps of storefront businesses and swap meets.

On Thursday, the task force seized an estimated $500,000 to $800,000 worth of illegal pharmaceuticals in Van Nuys, one of about 150 raids that have led to more than 50 arrests in the Los Angeles area.

‘Enough Drugs to Stock a Thrifty’

The raid at a La Colmena general store unearthed “enough drugs to stock a Thrifty or a Sav-on,” said Gregory Thompson, a pharmacist with the Los Angeles County Department of Health Services.

Officials said most of the drugs--which were being sold over the counter to anyone who requested them--were found hidden behind false walls in the store. Police seized codeine syrups, Valium and penicillin, which can be sold legally only with prescriptions.

Thompson said some drugs confiscated were medications banned in the United States because of their life-threatening side effects. These, he said, included Dipiron, an anti-inflammatory treatment, and Sexpronto, a steroid marketed as a sexual aid for men.

Under an emergency state law enacted in September, the task force closed the store, which sells everything from food and clothing to toys and Tarot-card readings.

While the raid was being conducted in Van Nuys, the meeting of top-level Orange County officials heard Santa Ana Police Chief Paul M. Walters describe his city’s dual approach of enforcement and education.

Walters wasn’t available for comment after the meeting, but Capt. Dan McCoy explained that police invited on the task force all agencies with an interest in curtailing illegal health clinics.

“We brought everybody together to try to determine the scope of the problem,” McCoy said. “We had the death of the young boy and we were using community policing strategy to deal with this.”

Police brought in U.S. Customs and the state Medical Board, for instance, along with the Postal Service, the U.S. Drug Enforcement Administration and the county Health Care Agency.

The task force focused on bogus physicians operating out of fake medical clinics and the illegal dispensing of medication.

“We had a lot of medication being sold at general merchandise stores, dress shops and swap meets,” McCoy said.

The task force made unannounced inspections of clinics and found, instead of wrongdoing, “a vast improvement in quality,” said Steven Rhoten, senior investigator with the state Medical Board.

“It didn’t appear too much of anything was going wrong,” he said, and no citations were issued.

But it was a different story with the city’s numerous botanicas, or herbal remedy shops, McCoy said.

“We went to suspected locations where they had [illegal] prescription drugs displayed right on the shelves. I mean you could see them behind the store clerk’s shoulder,” McCoy said.

As word got out in the immigrant community, pushed in part by Spanish-language media, the problem storefront operations dried up, he said.

The task force hasn’t disbanded, McCoy said. It is called in whenever police receive tips from the public about a possible illegal clinic.

“All it takes is a phone call to get everyone together,” he said.

Times staff writer Doug Shuit contributed to this report.

* NO HELP--Police probing Tustin clinic say no one’s offering any information. B3