Former pharmacist sentenced to year in prison

A grocery store pharmacist started collecting customers' leftover medications for a charity. When the charity (which had been operating illegally, by the way) stopped picking up, he got the bright idea of selling the old meds to customers and pocketing the customers' copays. He pleaded guilty to misbranding drugs and deceptively acquiring a controlled substance. HeraldNet: Former pharmacist sentenced to year in prison, Everett Herald, Feb. 28, 2009.

Ronald Friedman, the assistant U.S. attorney who handled the prosecuting, has been a Trial Ad instructor at the UW.

See also Guilty plea in reselling of store drugs, Seattle P-I, Oct. 31, 2008. (Grammar geek digression: This headline had the subhead: "pharmacist filled orders, pockets." That, I believe, is a zeugma. Playing a word game at my boss's house, we came across that word and didn't know what it meant. The dictionary on my Mac has this for zeugma: "a figure of speech in which a word applies to two others in different senses (e.g., John and his license expired last week) or to two others of which it semantically suits only one (e.g., with weeping eyes and hearts). The example we found that day was "He took his hat and his leave.")