Dying veterans received saline drips while VA hospital staff stole their morphine

Thursday, March 24, 2016 by: PF Louis
Tags: VA hospitals, morphine drugs, drug thefts

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(NaturalNews) What a time for the VA to have a drug theft story come out that leaves veterans without treatment. Media reports of high level corruption among top VA bureaucrats along with trashing applications have become common. To be fair, drug theft from hospital pharmacies is on the rise throughout our "healthcare" system.

The VA hospital that had its hospice morphine stolen often over a one-year period or more is the Albany Stratton VA Hospital in Albany, the state capitol of New York. Hospice is where terminally ill or aging individuals are sent to die in peace, supposedly.

According to the 28-year-veteran whistleblowing nurse Valerie Riviello, "A nurse taking care of hospice patients over the past year had been diverting vials of morphine. Those patients that were dying in hospice were not getting their intended pain medication."

Nurse Riviello explained how a nurse in charge of hospice patients was able to use a code to remove morphine from a dispensing machine legitimately without upsetting the records of how much was removed. But those vials of morphine taken from the machine were replaced by saline solutions.

So instead of receiving their morphine to be pain free, the Albany VA hospice people were getting IV saline, a .9 percent salt-in-water solution that approximates seawater and is intended for reducing dehydration, raising blood volume, overcoming negative clinical responses from anesthesia, and sometimes even for chronic fatigue. Those are surprising benefits from saline IVs!

According to Valerie, the worst part of this tale is that management didn't know the thefts were taking place for close to a year, and the discovery of morphine thefts was not reported to officials higher up in the VA system. Meanwhile, where did the morphine go?

Are the VA staff a bunch of stoners, or was someone involved as a distributor for black market pharmaceutical street sales?

Stolen drugs from the Oklahoma VA Center have been the source for inner Oklahoma City's pharmaceutical illicit street drug trade for some time, yet it seems no one has been charged with the thefts. But VA hospitals are not the only suppliers to the pharmaceutical street drug trade.

Non-VA hospitals are the biggest suppliers of illicit street pharmaceuticals

The largest known theft case occurred in NYC where Beth Israel now Mt. Sinai Beth Israel pharmacist Anthony D'Allesandro had managed to hide over 193,000 missing oxycodone pills and other drugs that NYC prosecutors think wound up in the streets of New York.

The prosecution is considering using drug lord laws against him, which would put him in the position of receiving a life term. It would be the first case under those laws against a hospital staff distributor of illicit drugs.

D'Allesandro claims he didn't supply street drug merchants. He claimed he had ankle pain and got caught up in an oxycodone habit using it for his pain. But prosecutors pointed out that in April 2014 he was tested for drugs and the tests showed he was clean.

And the sheer volume of drugs, almost 200,000 missing for five years under cover of phony electronic tracking to researchers doesn't hold up. If he had taken the drugs himself, "we'd be at his funeral, instead of his arraignment," prosecutor Ryan Sakacz told the judge as D'Alessandro entered his not-guilty plea.

Yes, there have been other reports from other hospitals and pharmacies involved with getting those heavy narcotic drugs into the streets. This has created an epidemic equivalent to cocaine and heroin use, courtesy of Big Pharma.

Sources for this article include:

http://dailycaller.com

http://www.startribune.com/lifestyle/health/147935985.html

http://abcnews.go.com

http://www.cortjohnson.org