A pharmacist in Ottawa who staged a fake robbery at his shop to cover up the diversion of thousands of fentanyl patches he was trafficking on the street has been found guilty of drug-related offences. It’s the latest instance of a healthcare professional in Canada being implicated in the opioid crisis that has seen skyrocketing overdose death rates.An Ontario Court convicted Waseem Shaheen of fentanyl trafficking, public mischief and insurance fraud, the Ottawa Citizen reported this weekend. However he was acquitted of the conspiracy to commit robbery, as the robbery was a fake one.Shaheen, who owned three pharmacies in Ottawa, was arrested by police in 2015 and charged with drug trafficking crimes and conspiracy to commit robbery after he called in a robbery by knifepoint at one of his shops and claimed the thief took more than $25,000 worth of fentanyl patches. Investigators eventually turned their attention toward Shaheen whom they discovered was filling out fake prescriptions for the drug that’s legally prescribed for chronic pain relief.Shaheen testified at trial in his defense that he was a bad record-keeper and couldn’t keep tabs on the missing fentanyl. But Justice Robert Wadden slammed Shaheen’s testimony as a “self-serving web of lies.”Shaheen has yet to be sentenced, but pharmacists and doctors in similar criminal cases have faced jail time and hefty fines for their crimes. A former pharmacist from Woodstock, Ontario was sentenced to a decade in prison this fall after he was found guilty of stealing and trafficking thousands of fentanyl and hydromorphone patches with a street value of $1 million. The judge in that case said it’s the role of pharmacists to ensure the public is protected from narcotics.The Ottawa investigation also found that employees at Shaheen’s shop became concerned he was ordering a surplus of fentanyl patches at numbers far greater than what was being prescribed. For instance the pharmacy bought 6,705 patches from 2013 to 2014, but dispensed fewer than half of them. One employee alerted the Ontario College of Pharmacists, which eventually opened an investigation into the matter and will host a disciplinary hearing for Shaheen in the future.In October, another Ontario pharmacist and two alleged accomplices were charged by York Regional Police after a pharmacy in Georgina was robbed of fentanyl and other drugs at gunpoint. The trio is facing a number of criminal charges including conspiracy to traffic a controlled substance and theft over $5,000.While the illicit diversion of prescription fentanyl from doctors’ offices and pharmacies has played a problematic role in the opioid overdose crisis, it’s the bootleg version of the drug being cut into street drugs such as heroin that has been linked to thousands of deaths across North America. This fentanyl supply is believed to be coming predominantly from fake pharmaceutical labs in China.
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