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A pharmacist who was involved in sending controlled drugs to the United States, sometimes using falsified customs declarations, has been suspended for three months by the General Pharmaceutical Council.

Dharmesh Nilesh Bhagat first joined the GPhC register in January 2022 having worked for 13 years as a pharmacy technician at Lords Dispensing Chemist in Barking, east London. He carried on working there as a pharmacist on joining the register.

Under the guidance of his mentor, superintendent pharmacist Hemantkumar Navnitbhai Patel, he dispensed and supplied drugs including opioids, benzodiazepines and sleeping tablets for patients based in the US. Mr Patel was struck off for his role in this activity in March this year.

In December 2022, a GPhC inspector visited the pharmacy after the MHRA received a tip-off from the United Nations that packages despatched from the premises had been intercepted by US Customs.

The inspector found packages in the pharmacy that had been prepared for despatch to America and labelled as containing health supplements, when in fact they contained “mainly Schedule 4 and 5 CDs”. Prescriptions for US patients were also found on a nearby workbench.

Mr Patel told the inspector the pharmacy had been working with an EU-based prescribed called HealthInfoServices for three years. This company was based in Bulgaria and not regulated in the UK.

Mr Bhagat was found to have been one of two pharmacists working on a daily basis at the pharmacy, which had no export licence, between January and December 2022.

He admitted to having on multiple occasions entered false data on customs declaration forms, as well as having completed labels for dispensed medicines against private prescriptions issued by the online prescribing service and dispensing drugs against some of these prescriptions.

The FtP committee found that Mr Bhagat had “taken no, or no effective steps” to ensure that the overseas medicine supplies were carried out in a safe manner.

Mr Bhagat said in his oral evidence that he had asked the superintendent pharmacist why the CDs were labelled as health supplements and been told a generic product description was used to prevent theft, adding that it did not occur to him whether the term would make it less likely for the packages to be stopped by US customs.

He said that while the practice of posting medicines to the US raised “alarm bells” he made no further inquiries after Mr Patel told him the prescriptions were written by GPs, “possibly because I had the belief he knew what he was doing and I didn’t want to interfere as opposed to waiting for him to tell me which wasn’t right”.

The FtP committee found that Mr Bhagat had “lent himself repeatedly to a particularly dangerous and harmful enterprise” and been “wilfully blind” to his role but added that he “played a relatively limited role under the direction of his mentor” with whom he had a “unique relationship” and that he has worked as a community pharmacist without risk for the last three years.

The committee imposed a short three-month suspension order, with no requirement for a review hearing given the insight and remediation Mr Bhagat has been able to demonstrate as well as the finding that he is unlikely to repeat the misconduct.