Advertisement Veteran's pain pills intercepted by mail thieves Local veterans are targeted for pill thefts Share Shares Copy Link Copy

Hundreds of bottles of narcotics have been stolen from patients across Northern California, but not because of a break-in at a home or at a pharmacy. KCRA 3 Investigates found that the drugs are being taken from the mail, and military veterans seem to be the target.Every day, Bruce Lowery makes the trip from his home over an old bridge made of creosote-treated wood down to the tiny one-room post office in Brooks, California. Just getting that mail is a major task for him.Lowery is disabled and in chronic pain from a series of accidents. The last one, where he was hit by a personal watercraft, nearly killed him. He is so disabled only the pain medication he takes helps him get through the day."So that I can walk. So that I have some quality of life,” Lowery said.Lowery’s medication is prescribed through the Department of Veterans Affairs. Once filled, the prescriptions are sent through the mail so that he doesn’t have to subject himself to too much travel and increased wear and tear on his body. The VA closely monitors how much he takes."They keep track of the amount of morphine in my blood by doing blood tests and urine samples,” Lowery said.Every 28 days he is supposed to get a refill mailed from the VA pharmacy, but in the last six months, three shipments of pills never arrived."I get all my other medications, no problem,” Lowery said.Non-narcotic pills will often be shipped in a white plastic bag. Lowery’s pain pills, however, are not. They come in a nondescript brown box with a white and green label."Everybody gets it in the box with the green tag,” Lowery said. “That's just how it is. It's certified mail, that way you make sure you sign for it."It’s only his pain pills that require a signature. Lowery thinks it’s the fact that his morphine is always in the same brown box with that required signature that singles it out for someone who might want to steal it. He reported the lost pills to his local post office, which filed a report tracking the packages.The packages leave the VA pharmacy and arrive in the West Sacramento Postal Sorting Facility. But the Postal Service's tracking shows the packages never leave there."Every time they check on it, it's in West Sacramento, lost,” Lowery said. "It's been stolen, and (the Postal Service) is doing nothing to stop this!"The response Lowery got from the Postal Inspector General’s Office was a letter saying they could not find his package in the dead-letter office."If someone stole it, no, they are not going to find it,” Lowery said.When the medications don’t show up, Lowery has to drive nearly an hour to the VA hospital. He files a police report, gives that report to a doctor, then waits for the doctor to approve a new prescription, which he then takes to the pharmacy to get filled."Lost or stolen medication needs to be recorded and tracked. That's a federal mandate,” said Sgt. Neil Wilkendorf, who is a detective with the VA Police.Normally people with stolen drugs have to drive to the police station and file a report. One positive of the VA is that the police are located there at the hospital, making it easier when vets have a prescription stolen, Wilkendorf said.As it turns out, Lowery isn’t the only one with this problem.“For 2015, we had 162 thefts,” Wilkendorf said.Wilkendorf said that the complaints have led to five convictions of postal workers involved in mail theft. That’s just theft involving prescriptions that originated from Northern California VA facilities, including Mather, Martinez and Travis.When investigations point to postal workers, the VA police said it gets complicated."In the event that it's a postal worker, 90 percent of that investigative work is done by the post office, the (Office of Inspector General) Agent specifically,” Wilkendorf said. “That has to do with jurisdictional boundaries, and we don't want to step on their toes. We have the ability to do quite a bit of investigation our own, but what we tend to do in-house is track."Officials with the U.S. Postal Inspector General’s Office would not go on camera. After KCRA 3 Investigates called, the office started an inquiry at the West Sacramento Sorting Facility. That inquiry sparked increased security and oversight.Still, police at the Veterans Administration said that the problem could be bigger because drugs coming from other mail-order pharmacies could be stolen as well. Like VA prescriptions, many of those other companies’ mail-order narcotics require signatures upon delivery."That's a safe assumption. If it's signature required, and it's in a post office bag or they're shipped in, it's not hard to determine that it's a most likely a narcotic,” Wilkendorf said.As for Lowery, he now travels the hour from Brooks to Travis every month just to get his refills, but that’s not what bothers him.“It's not just me. There's lots of veterans out there that don't get their medications because of whoever is stealing them, you know, and it's ridiculous,” he said.Even with that increased oversight at the West Sacramento facility, Lowery said his pharmacy at Travis Air Force Base won’t send him the pills in the mail until they know the drugs won’t be stolen or lost inside the West Sacramento facility.For now, Lowery will keep making the drive until they can find out where his pills have been going.