Before federal agents arrested its owners yesterday, Baltimore's Newcare pharmacy appeared to be a phenomenal success.
The prescription drug distributor ordered 4,200 doses of the painkiller hydrocodone in 2003. In 2004, the orders bumped up slightly, prosecutors said in federal court.
Suddenly, sales skyrocketed into the millions. And this year, authorities said, the Northeast Baltimore company had already bought 4.8 million doses of the drug, commonly known as Vicodin.
But according to prosecutors, the amazing performance concealed a lucrative cybercrime: The company sold more than $20 million worth of the painkiller to Internet customers without legitimate prescriptions.
Federal drug agents fanned across the region early yesterday, charging Newcare's owners, seizing their expansive suburban homes in Harford County, locking up their luxury cars and shutting down their multiple bank accounts.
Carl J. Kotowski, assistant special agent in charge of the Drug Enforcement Administration's Baltimore office, said the operation at Newcare sparked the largest federal pharmaceutical drug investigation in the state's history.
"It's not like [they had] to go out onto the street," Kotowski said of Newcare's customers. "Everything is very discreet. You just go online. It's no different than buying a book on Amazon."
Like Quaaludes and Valium in the 1970s, Vicodin's illicit use has been treated recently by playwrights, novelists and screenwriters as a less dangerous, and more socially acceptable, way for characters to relieve life's pressures without resorting to heroin or cocaine.
On the Fox television show House, the irritable but brilliant Dr. Gregory House has suffered from chronic pain and battled an addiction to Vicodin.
But the increasing problem of illegal sales of prescription drugs online has also worried drug enforcement agents and anti-drug abuse advocates alike.
DEA Administrator Karen P. Tandy told Congress in April that her agency had initiated 100 new Internet investigations involving the online sales of prescription drugs during the last fiscal year, arresting 62 people and seizing $44 million in cash, property, computers and bank account assets.
In the DEA's Operation Cyberchase, agents targeted about 200 Web sites alleged to have illegally sold prescription drugs and arrested 25 people in the United States, Asia, Europe, and the Caribbean.
Some advocates for more regulation said not enough has been done.
