Cincinnati pharmacists know just how precarious their jobs are -- they are surrounded by serious medications all day and are filling prescriptions based off of doctors' orders. In the overall scheme of things, they have very little control over who gets which drugs and how much. They also have no control over whether patients will follow their directions or whether they will overdose. Because of this lack of control, when a pharmacists faces prescription drug charges, it calls into question his or her actual culpability.

After a Columbus pharmacist was recently charged with over 200 counts of illegally dispensing prescription pain killers, he chose to plead guilty to one count of illegally prescribing oxycodone. It is unclear how much time the man could have spent in prison if he had been convicted on all 200 plus drug charges, but after pleading guilty to the one count, he received a two-year sentence. He must also complete one year of home detention and perform over 200 hours of community service.

In some situations, it makes more sense to take a plea deal in exchange for pleading guilty than to go to trial and attempt to clear your name. Because pleading guilty is extremely serious, even on the most minor of charges, it is important to work closely with an experienced criminal defense attorney. An attorney can provide invaluable advice on the consequences of filing a guilty plea and whether it would make more sense to accept a deal than go to trial.

This pharmacist was the first person to be convicted in Ohio on the theory that pharmacists are not required to fill prescriptions from suspicious doctors. The prosecutor argued that the pharmacist should have known better than to fill prescriptions from doctors who frequently prescribed pain killers or wrote "too many" prescriptions. It is unclear how many prescriptions from a single doctor were filled at his pharmacy, however.

Source: KTAR.com, "Pharmacist gets 2 years in Ohio pain pill case," Andrew Welsh-Huggins, Jan. 9, 2012