Pharmacist jailed for illegal sale of prescription drugs
A PHARMACIST has been sentenced to 12 months in jail for selling hundreds of thousands of doses of addictive prescription drugs on the black market.
Balkeet Singh Khaira, who worked at his mother’s Khaira Pharmacy on the high street in West Bromwich, was sentenced at Birmingham crown court last week.
The court was told that the 36-year-old allowed customers to buy the restricted medicines, which were meant to be sold only with prescriptions, at huge profit during 2016 and 2017.
The value of the pills on the black market were estimated at more than £1 million.
Khaira had qualified as a pharmacist in 2008 and was working in the family business, Khaira Care Ltd, the court heard. His mother was found not to be involved in any of the criminal activity.
When contacted about the investigation by the General Pharmaceutical Council (GPC), Khaira pretended to be his mother and said he was “shocked and blindsided” by the accusations. He then went on to provide falsified evidence intended to disprove the allegations, the UK’s Medicines and Healthcare products Regulatory Authority (MHRA) said.
While Khaira admitted to the charges, he maintained that after initially making a voluntary sale to drug dealers, he was then forced by them to sell more medicines after he was threatened outside his pharmacy.
Khaira was suspended from the GPC’s pharmacist register under an interim order, meaning that he was unable to practise while waiting for the case to come to court.
“It is a serious criminal offence to sell controlled, unlicensed or prescription-only medicines in this way,” said Grant Powell, enforcement officer with the MHRA, who led the case.