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I have a crafty nurse to thank for my job as the medication safety officer here at Lehigh Valley Hospital in Allentown, Pa. About 5 years ago, this nurse began stealing the powerful pain med Demerol to feed her own drug habit. She'd punch in her 4-digit code to open the locked narcotics cabinet, cut a few tablets out of the unit dose containers and replace them with other tablets. Because the plastic coverings on the packages were amber, it was hard to see that she was replacing yellow pills with white ones. To conceal her tampering, the nurse taped the Demerol packages together in strips of 10 so, she claimed, they'd be easier to count. She got away with this for 4 months. Eventually, though, somebody noticed that the packages were tampered with and that patients who received bogus pills were still complaining of pain.
