A recovery room nurse at a plastic surgery center who admitted to stealing Demerol to feed her addiction was sentenced last week in U.S. District Court in Seattle to a year and a day in prison and 3 years of supervised release for product tampering in violation of federal law, officials say.
Drea Lynne Gibson, 43, worked as a nurse at the Plastic Surgery Center in Bellevue, Wash., from 2003 to November 2008. A news release from the U.S. Attorney's Office paints a picture of escalating addiction to the painkiller and plots a timeline of increasingly risky behavior to divert the drug.
Ms. Gibson began abusing Demerol by drinking the portion of the drug left over in glass ampules after some of the contents were administered to patients. On repeated occasions, Ms. Gibson completed written documents reporting as "waste" Demerol that she consumed at the clinic.
As her addiction worsened, Ms. Gibson began stealing whole ampules from the Demerol box. She completed records indicating the drugs were being administered to patients.
In October and November, Gibson began breaking open and consuming the contents of Demerol ampules and refilling the ampules with saline solution. She then super-glued the ampules back together, and returned them to the Demerol box. As a result, ampules containing saline solution, secured by Super Glue, were disguised to appear as genuine Demerol ampules. On numerous occasions in November, anesthesiologists at the clinic administered the tampered ampules to patients recovering from surgery under the belief that they were administering Demerol. When a patient complained that her pain was not being relieved, the anesthesiologist switched pain medications and administered fentanyl to relieve the pain.
Ms. Gibson was fired by the clinic on Nov. 17, 2008, following discovery of several saline-filled tampered Demerol ampules inside the Demerol box. The Super Glue used by Gibson was found in the recovery room, along with broken Demerol ampules, and other evidence of tampering.
At the height of her addiction, Ms. Gibson admitted to law enforcement authorities that she was taking between 2 and 3 ampules per day during October and November 2008. In a statement, she admitted she was addicted to Demerol and estimated that she had unlawfully taken not less than 100 Demerol ampules from the clinic.
At sentencing U.S. District Judge Ricardo Martinez said, "This is an extremely serious offense. Using Demerol for herself is one thing, stealing it is another. But replacing it with something else takes it to another level. Replacing the Demerol with epinephrine shows she was willing to put other people in pain and even at risk of death to treat her own pain."
Ms. Gisbon had been a Washington State licensed registered nurse since 1995. In 2001, she was sanctioned by the Washington State Nursing Commission for removing a patient's prescription for oxycodone while working at Olympic Memorial Hospital in Port Angeles, Wash., and attempting to fill that prescription for herself at a local pharmacy.
Dan O'Connor
