MURFREESBORO — Mention “Reeves-Sain” in Murfreesboro and people remember the former old-time drug store by that name and its soda fountain.

“What our pharmacy can’t cure, our milkshakes can,” was its prized slogan.

But from a nearby building in the same strip mall, its owners ran a complex web of pharmaceutical businesses that purchased millions of opioid pills during the peak of Tennessee’s prescription opioid boom, while the overdose death rate was skyrocketing.

One of the companies, Reeves-Sain Extended Care, was the state's top buyer of opioid pills from 2006 to 2012, according to U.S. Drug Enforcement Agency data obtained and released publicly by the Washington Post in July.

However on Monday — more than a month after the release — the pharmacy's current owner contested the data, claiming its repackaging company originally reported information incorrectly to the DEA.

The dispute adds to a growing list of questions the owners have not answered since the data was released: How many pills were delivered to individual patients' homes instead of nursing facilities with strict safeguards? Why did the pharmacy have a large spike in opioid purchases in 2009? If the data was reported incorrectly, who made the mistake?

Even if the company supplied every single nursing home and hospice patient in the Southern U.S., the Murfreesboro pharmacy, based on the DEA data, would have outnumbered patients with opioid pills by about 13 to 1.

Roughly 1 million patients a year enter hospice or nursing home facilities in 16 southern states, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. At its peak, Reeves-Sain Extended Care purchased 13.6 million pills a year, during a 36-month stretch between December 2008 and December 2011, the DEA data shows.

“You’re talking egregious numbers,” said Bob Kewley, an independent pharmacist consultant in New York who specializes in nursing homes. Because patient records are confidential, Reeves-Sain representatives would be the only one who could explain where the pills went, Kewley said. “These millions and millions of doses - it all has to make sense to somebody.”

The pharmacy's then co-owners — Shane Reeves and Richard Sain — say the extended care pharmacy filled prescriptions for nursing home and hospice patients who suffered from debilitating pain. Health care workers kept close tabs on the medication, they say, limiting how much could be sold illicitly or used by people other than the patients.

But the extended care pharmacy was linked to a rapidly-expanding home delivery service that did not have the pill monitoring found in an institutional setting. Instead the prescriptions were shipped or hand-delivered directly to a residence, with no way of tracking who took the pills.

And at least one worker took advantage of the opioids flowing through Reeves-Sain. In 2008 police arrested a janitor for stealing about 10,000 pills from the pharmacy. His actions went undetected for months.

TwelveStone Health Partners, the current owner of the extended care business, issued a statement this week saying the "numbers provided to the Automated Reports and Consolidated Ordering System [DEA] database were inaccurate and inflated by a factor of 18 times over the correct number for the medication Lortab." The company said it hired the law firm Pepper Hamilton "to validate the findings and submit updated data to the DEA."

But pharmacies aren't responsible for reporting to the DEA. Their suppliers are required to document each sale. The database is part of the government's effort to track and stem the diversion of opioids to illicit uses. According to the Post data, most of the pills sold to Reeves-Sain Extended Care came from Murfreesboro Pharmaceutical Nursing Supply, a company owned by Reeve's father, Richard Reeves.

Murfreesboro Pharmaceutical Nursing Supply "should not have reported these repackaging activities as purchases or sales," TwelveStone spokeswoman Rachel Schreiber said in a statement. The repackaging company, according to TwelveStone, also incorrectly reported the quantity of pills and used the wrong drug code in reporting, which inflated the quantity. Based on the recalculations, Schreiber said, the pharmacy ranked 257th in the state, instead of first.

Richard Reeves, the former mayor of Murfreesboro, did not respond to messages seeking comment Monday.

"If a pharmacy has a dispute over order data reported to ARCOS, the pharmacy can contact their supplier to raise their concern," said Kevin McWilliams, public information officer for the DEA Louisville Field Division. "If a discrepancy is identified, the suppliers will submit a correction. Pharmacies do not have that authority, for obvious reasons."

Shane Reeves declined to be interviewed. His current business, TwelveStone, also did not respond to a list of detailed questions.

In an interview, Sain said the extended care pharmacy primarily served institutional patients, but he did not respond to a second request for comment Tuesday.

The Post data tracks hydrocodone and oxycodone pills sold in the U.S., from their manufacturers and distributors to the pharmacies that purchased them. Ranging from 2006 to 2012, the records were released as part of an ongoing civil case against the nation's largest opioid distributors and manufacturers, filed by hundreds of cities and counties.

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From cow pastures to sophisticated production

The Reeves-Sain pharmacy network had humble beginnings. What started as a roadside trailer shop with two employees grew to a prominent brand across the region. Known then as Reeves-Powell Drug Store, the company was formed in 1979 by Ron Powell and Richard Reeves.

The men launched a nursing supply store, a compounding center and a medical supply store all in the same strip center. The retail pharmacy store expanded to include the soda fountain and a satellite post office.

At the time, Murfreesboro wasn't much more than a "blink and you'll miss it" farm town. Cow pastures and farmland dominated the area. The pharmacy latched onto this small town charm as business expanded and Murfreesboro grew into a city.

In the early 1990s, the company started providing nursing homes with prepackaged medicine for patients. Soon after, the ownership changed hands: Shane Reeves and Rick Sain bought the business, renaming it Reeves-Sain. During the next two decades, the brand grew to include seven health care companies, providing services ranging from compounding to in-home intravenous infusions.

In 2005, Reeves-Sain repurposed the packaging technology, dubbed MediPACK, used for nursing homes, and began home-delivery and shipping ready-made daily dosages to patients at home.

“This whole concept is the tip of the spear as to where we’re going in the next five years,” Reeves-Sain owner Shane Reeves said in a 2007 story in The Daily News-Journal. “We want to grow in the thousands. There’s no one doing this in the entire South.”

The long-term care industry has tight controls on how pills are stored and handed out, but home deliveries have less oversight.

It isn't clear where the MediPack home deliveries are accounted for in the Washington Post data. Reeves-Sain Extended Care is listed as purchasing 45.9 million pills, the Reeves-Sain retail pharmacy with the soda fountain is listed as buying 3.3 million, and a specialty pharmacy — Reeves-Sain Drug Store/EntrustRx in Spring Hill — has a record of 310,000.

Thousands of missing pills

At Reeves-Sain an investigation showed about 10,000 opioid pills were stolen in a four-month period by a janitor.

Surveillance footage showed him stealing pills from the pharmacy’s shelves, and the pharmacy’s operations director notified police about missing Lortab pills, the Daily News-Journal reported.

When he was arrested, police found nearly 500 Lortab pills in the janitor’s pockets. It’s unclear why pharmacy employees didn’t notice the missing medication sooner.

The janitor was distributing the pills for resale, Murfreesboro police told the Daily News-Journal at the time, and several others unrelated to Reeves-Sain were implicated in a regional pill distribution ring.

Owners make $67 million on sale

The city’s beloved hometown pharmacy kept serving milkshakes and dispensing meds under local ownership until 2015, when it was sold to the major retail chain Fred's. Reeves and Sain parted with the retail pharmacy and EntrustRX for $67 million. Then in 2018, the pharmacy was sold to Walgreen's, which unexpectedly shuttered the Murfreesboro retail pharmacy.

After selling to Fred’s, Reeves folded the remaining services into TwelveStone Health Partners. TwelveStone coordinates with physicians, hospitals and long-term care facilities to provide a patient’s pharmacy, medical equipment and other needs. Reeves is the owner and CEO.

In 2018 Reeves followed his father’s footsteps into politics and launched a run for state Senate. While campaigning, Reeves advocated for solutions to the opioid crisis, saying he believed the public should have limited access to pain pills.

During this year’s legislative session he sponsored a bill to easesome of Tennessee’s recent prescription opioid limits, which were some of the strictest in the nation.

Generally, a provider in Tennessee can’t prescribe more than a three-day supply, except under limited circumstances. Reeves’ bill expanded those circumstances and increased the amount that could be dispensed.

Before the law was changed, a doctor could prescribe certain surgery patients, for instance, with a 20-day supply of opioids. Reeves’ bill lengthened that to 30 days and upped the allowed dosage by 40 percent. Also, the new law lifted the dosage limits for all patients undergoing palliative care. Before, cancer patients and those in hospice were exempt from dosage limits.

Reeves, in an email, said the Tennessee Pharmacist Association and Tennessee Medical Association brought him the bill to “address some unintended consequences that patients (i.e. post-surgical, end of life) were experiencing as a result of the Tennessee Together bill that passed in 2018.”

The changes aligned with Twelvestone’s business strategy. In 2017 Reeves told a trade publication that he was exploring a partnership with Nashville-based Aspire Health, which calls itself the nation’s largest community-based palliative care provider.

State Senate rules require a member to declare a conflict of interest if a vote would result in a direct monetary gain or any other advantage. Reeves said he declared a personal conflict. The Senate Office of the Chief clerksays he did not. Reeves did not respond to a reporter's request for clarification.