Actavis opiate shipment hit by cargo thieves in USA

Generic drugmaker Actavis suffered a full truckload (FTL) cargo theft on October 19, losing more than 30 pallets of opioid analgesics, benzodiazepines and epilepsy drugs.

The thieves made off with 14 pallets of oxycodone HCl tablets (around 70,000 units), six pallets of anxiety drug alprazolam (around 24,000 units) and nine pallets of the epilepsy drug gabapentin (about 5,000 units). The estimated value of the haul has not yet been released.

The shipment was taken at a truck stop in Washington County, Pennsylvania, whilst en route from a facility in Elizabeth, New Jersey, to a warehouse in Louisville, Kentucky, according to an alert from the Pharmaceutical Cargo Security Consortium (PCSC).

The carrier was GSI Trucking and both trailer and tractor were taken after the driver left the vehicle running while he went inside the truck stop to purchase cigarettes. While the truck had a GPS tracker installed the alarm was not raised immediately because the legitimate driver was thought to be behind the wheel.

The tractor was recovered by Pennsylvania State Police but the trailer and its contents remain unaccounted for.

A quarterly update on North American cargo theft trends by Chubb Insurance notes that there were 16 pharmaceutical and over-the-counter medicines thefts in the third quarter of 2011, around 7 per cent of the total of 216 recorded in the period.

Pharmaceuticals were the fourth most common target for the thieves, after food and non-alcoholic beverages (42 losses), consumer electronics (23) and building materials (21). Clothing also featured highly with 15 incidents, followed by metals (14) and alcoholic drinks (12).