Pharmacy Fishing Admission from Police, Spokesman Caught in Complete Fabrication

by: odum

Fri Dec 07, 2007 at 18:00:22 PM EST

The Vermont State Police admitted Friday that detectives recently asked three pharmacies to hand over all their information on patients prescribed powerful painkillers, despite a directive from state law enforcement officials not to do so.

Lt. John Flanagan said three State Police detectives requested that information from three pharmacies in Vermont during the last two weeks, but that supervisors have now put a stop to that effort.

"Mistakes were made," Flanagan said. "From our perspective this is a training issue and we have taken steps to remedy it."

This directly and completely contradicts what Major Tom L'Esperance was desperately spinning saying on Mark Johnson's show. In that appearance (and you should listen to the podcast - it would seem to be a complete fantasyland account based on what we now know), he insisted it was an isolated misunderstanding at one pharmacy, and proceeded with an elaborately detailed counter-history of the incident. I'm not saying he personally made it up - but somebody sure did. Circling the wagons doesn't work when the wheels all fall off.

But the word that this was all just a "training issue" needs a bit more explanation. Is that to say that three full Detectives spontaneously across the state had some sort of rookie-mistake breakdown? Please. And what is the third pharmacy in question? We currently know that pharmacists at Fairfax Pharmacy and Wells RIver Pharmacy were approached. Who else?

The State Police need to come clean about the full extent of this program, and what specifically the plan was for implementation. There's still an email out there, supposedly sent last Friday when pharmacists started pushing back, that is likely going to be incriminating when it finally surfaces (and it should be a matter of public record).

No doubt there'll be more in tomorrow's paper.