CVS pharmacist steals opioids to ‘get through’ day and blames ‘insane’ stress, feds say

A CVS pharmacist accused of stealing opioids and replacing them with other pills said he was under “insane amounts of stress” in Virginia, federal officials said.

Dillon Breeding, 34, has been sentenced to two years in prison after pleading guilty to a charge of tampering with consumer products, the U.S. Attorney’s Office for the Western District of Virginia said in an Aug. 26 news release.

His attorney declined to comment when reached by McClatchy News.

Breeding was a pharmacist for about four years and began stealing medication in May 2023 from the Gate City CVS, federal officials said in a criminal complaint.

Breeding is accused of stealing pills including oxycodone hydrochloride, hydromorphone and oxymorphone. Investigators said he took the pills from the pre-retail stock bottles that were stored in a narcotics safe, then replaced those with other pills to conceal his actions.

He’s accused of shorting patients of about 15-20 pills and taking them for himself.

According to his account, he stole pills for about five months until he became dependent on them and left the job in October, officials said.

In November, a pharmacy manager was filling a prescription for oxycodone hydrochloride 20 mg when they noticed the pills in the stock bottle had been replaced with prednisone, an anti-inflammation steroid, investigators said.

A few days later, the pharmacist who had been hired to replace Breeding was filling a patient’s prescription and noticed that the hydromorphone 8 mg had been replaced with leflunomide, which is used to treat rheumatoid arthritis, according to prosecutors.

If the patient had taken the leflunomide in the same dosage as the hydromorphone 8 mg, the patient would have “exceeded the maximum daily dosage of leflunomide,” officials said.

In a series of written statements to investigators, Breeding said he never took the pills for “any other purpose than to get through the work day.”

“I was experiencing intense physical pain in my back due to standing 11-12 hours a day and under insane amounts of stress and demands from (the) job,” he wrote, according to a sentencing memorandum.

Breeding is accused of stealing about 300 pills, and federal officials said he was dependent on them to the point he had to continue diverting pills every day to help with withdrawal.

Investigators said he also stole a bottle of testosterone to help with the effects of the opioids.

Breeding said he wished he had quit his job before this happened, but by the time he did, he “simply could not make it through the day (without) the help of the medication.”

He wrote that he made a mistake, and the opioids destroyed “his body, mind and spirit.”

One patient said she complained about her prescription being short whenever Breeding filled it, and when she tried to count the medication herself at the pharmacy, Breeding yelled at her, causing her to transfer her prescription elsewhere, officials said.

Prosecutors said he could have seriously harmed patients.

Breeding maintained he never gave the stolen drugs to anyone else or gave a patient the wrong prescription, but he accepted responsibility for his actions, according to prosecutors.

Gate City is in southwest Virginia.