The longtime owner of a Northeast Philadelphia pharmacy that once prescribed more OxyContin than any drugstore in the country has been sentenced to prison and ordered to pay more than $4 million to settle claims of defrauding the government.
Mitchell Spivack, 63, of Collegeville, was sentenced to three years and six months in prison, two years of supervised release, and ordered to pay $451,328 restitution and to forfeit $116,000.
U.S. District Judge Harvey Bartle III on Tuesday also ordered that Spivack and the business he owned for 30 years, Verree Pharmacy in Fox Chase, must pay the $4.1 million under the Controlled Substances Act, False Claims Act. They are banned from ever dispensing controlled substances.
In October 2019 Spivack was investigated by the U.S. Drug Enforcement Administration after the agency received reports of an unusually large volume of OxyContin orders coming into the pharmacy at 7960 Verree Road.
An Inquirer analysis of government data in December 2019 noted how the pharmacy had at one point ordered more OxyContin than any other U.S. pharmacy. When Purdue Pharma in 2010 changed the formula so the pills could not be crushed, keeping users from snorting or injecting the drug, the store’s OxyContin sales quickly plummeted by half.
» READ MORE: Ten years ago, OxyContin sales dominated Philly’s pharmacies. How the powerful painkiller helped fuel a crisis.
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