A former Mercer County pharmacist was convicted yesterday for her role in a conspiracy to distribute and dispense outside the course of professional practice large quantities of Schedule II controlled substances, including oxycodone, from a pharmacy that had been located in Trenton, New Jersey.
A former Mercer County pharmacist was convicted yesterday for her role in a conspiracy to distribute and dispense outside the course of professional practice large quantities of Schedule II controlled substances, including oxycodone, from a pharmacy that had been located in Trenton, New Jersey.
Florence Ndubizu, 64, of Princeton Junction, was convicted of two counts of an indictment charging her with conspiracy to unlawfully distribute and dispense Schedule II controlled substances, including oxycodone, between 2014 and 2017 and maintaining a premises for the illegal distribution of controlled substances.
A third count of unlawful distribution of controlled substances was dismissed before trial. The jury returned the guilty verdict following a two-week trial before U.S. District Judge Zahid N. Quraishi in Trenton federal court.
According to documents filed in this case and the evidence presented at trial, Ndubizu was the co-owner and pharmacist-in-charge of Healthcare Pharmacy in Trenton between 2014 and 2017.
She and her employee conspirators, acting at her direction, filled fraudulent prescriptions outside the usual course of professional practice, knowing that the drugs would not be used for a legitimate medical purpose, but instead would be illegally diverted, including to street-level drug dealers.
Ndubizu, operating a single-location pharmacy, purchased and distributed millions of dosage units of oxycodone, including over 800,000 pills in 2014; over 900,000 pills in 2015; over 800,000 pills in 2016; and over 200,000 pills in 2017, the year that the Drug Enforcement Administration (“DEA”) suspended the pharmacy’s registration.
Ndubizu diverted oxycodone pills and then evaded state and federal reporting requirements by manipulating the pharmacy’s records.
The DEA conducted an audit of Healthcare Pharmacy’s inventory and found that between April 2015 and August 2017 alone, Ndubizu and Healthcare Pharmacy diverted more than 64,000 pills containing oxycodone.
The conspiracy charge carries a maximum potential penalty of 20 years in prison and a $1 million fine, or twice the gross gain or loss from the offense. The charge of maintaining Healthcare Pharmacy as a drug-involved premises carries a maximum penalty of 20 years in prison and a $500,000 fine, or twice the gross gain or loss from the offense.
Ndubizu’s husband, Gordian A. Ndubizu, the co-owner of Healthcare Pharmacy, was separately convicted of tax evasion offenses after a jury trial in August 2024. Gordian A. Ndubizu was not charged with controlled substance offenses.
Members of the family who own Purdue Pharma, the maker of oxycodone hydrochloride (OxyContin), and the company itself, agreed to pay up to $7.4 billion in a new settlement to lawsuits over the toll of the powerful prescription painkiller.
The deal, agreed to by Purdue Pharma, the Sackler family members who own the company and lawyers representing state and local governments and thousands of victims of the opioid crisis, represents an increase of more than $1 billion over a previous settlement deal that was rejected last year by the U.S. Supreme Court.
The Supreme Court rejected Purdue Pharma’s bankruptcy settlement with the thousands of individuals, states and other entities who sued the company and some of the Sacklers for their role in perpetuating the opioid epidemic—striking down a provision in the deal that would have allowed the Sacklers to pay $6 billion in exchange for not facing any more civil lawsuits or criminal liability.
A nationwide opioid epidemic has been raging for decades. In recent years, overdoses have been linked to about 80,000 deaths a year.
The drug overdose crisis began 40 years ago, driven by heroin and crack/cocaine use.
In the 1990s, it shifted to prescription opioids due to widespread overprescribing of opioid medicines for pain relief.
Currently, the biggest killers are fentanyl and other potent substances produced illicitly in labs. Before that, it was heroin, and before that prescription drugs, including OxyContin, which hit the market in 1996.
Purdue targeted doctors with a campaign asserting that there was a low risk of addiction to its latest formulation of a kind of drug that’s been around for centuries.
No member of the Sackler family, which profited for years from the sale of OxyContin and at the expense of the suffering of millions, has faced criminal charges for their actions.
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