Bhm443M1C

Robert Courtney was a pioneer of the nuclear pharmacy community in Kansas City. He was well respected and wealthy business man. Thought to be the man who would catch on to new entrepreneur waves in the pharmacy world. Worth more than $10 million, he owned Courtney Pharmacy Incorporated and has been in the pharmaceutical business for more than twenty years. Throughout the years he acquired more than $600,000 in bad taxes and was failing to meet the $1 million obligation to his church. In order to fund his lifestyle along with other financial obligations, Courtney began diluting the chemotherapy medication he was distributing (Freed, 2009).

Twenty years ago Courtney was one of the first pharmacists to begin premixing chemotherapy drugs for oncology doctors in the area. This was a convenience for practitioners due to the ability to skip the mixing process and hang an intravenous bag immediately. Recently, the trust between pharmacist, doctor, and patient was shattered. In 2001, Courtney was found to be diluting the medications he was distributing to pocket hundreds of dollars per case of medication. Courtney was accused of diluting a variety of medications. That list includes: Taxol, Gemzar, Paraplatin, and Platinol. These medications were administered in the treatment of multitude of diseases from pancreatic, ovarian, and lung cancer as well as AIDS - related Kaposi’s sarcoma. These medications were meant to be dissolved into a saline solution. It appeared that Courtney was diluting the medication to 39% and some even as low as 1% in the saline solution. This was well below the intended effective dose (Belluck, 2001). He distributed the diluted drugs to 400 physicians and filled a possible 98,000 prescription. His misuse of his pharmaceutical skills could possibly effect 4,200 patients (Freed, 2009).

The case was first under investigation when a representative for the company who manufactures Gemzar, Eli Lilly and Company, took note of the drastic difference...