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A Haverhill licensed practical nurse was sentenced today in federal court in Boston for drug tampering.
Lauren Perrin, 47, was sentenced by U.S. Senior District Court Judge Mark L. Wolf to 54 months in prison and three years of supervised release. In September 2019, Perrin pleaded guilty to one count of tampering with a consumer product, specifically the Schedule II controlled substance morphine, which is used for pain relief.
While working as a licensed practical nurse at Maplewood Care and Rehabilitation Center in Amesbury, Perrin took morphine sulfate from three bottles prescribed to a hospice patient for her own personal use. In an attempt to avoid detection, she replaced the extracted morphine with cough syrup. Perrin’s tampering lowered the potency of the three bottles of morphine sulfate to only 4-29% of the intended potency. The victim was given the diluted morphine and deprived of necessary pain relief in the weeks before her death.
U.S. Attorney Andrew Lelling; Jeffrey Ebersole, Special Agent in Charge of the Food and Drug Administration, Office of Criminal Investigations; Phillip Coyne, Special Agent in Charge of the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services, Office of the Inspector General; and Commissioner Monica Bharel, MD, MPH, of the Massachusetts Department of Public Health made the announcement. Assistant U.S. Attorney Elysa Wan of Lelling’s Health Care Fraud Unit prosecuted the case.
