Former state employee gets prison time for import, sale of erectile dysfunction drugs
A former state employee who bought and resold generic drugs for erectile dysfunction — sometimes using his work email to do so — was sentenced Monday in federal court.
Howard Stanley Head Jr., 59, of Franklin County, was sentenced to a year and a day in prison, fined $1,000 and ordered to forfeit $30,275 in earnings from the illegal activity, the U.S. Attorney’s Office in Lexington announced Tuesday.
Head pleaded guilty in June to a charge of conspiracy to import misbranded prescription drugs, court records show. The plea agreement said that Head ordered generic versions of Viagra and Cialis from countries like India and Singapore. The packages arrived in the mail with “inaccurate or misleading descriptions of their contents, such as ‘Supplement,’” according to the plea agreement.
The U.S. Attorney’s Office said Head ordered thousands of generic tablets for erectile dysfunction online between July 2015 and October 2019. He resold them for a profit in Frankfort and elsewhere in Kentucky, sometimes using his state employee email address to place the orders and contact customers, the government said in a news release.
The sales covered in Head’s plea agreement were between mid-2015 and October 2019, but he had a business card that said he’d been in business since 2009, according to a sentencing memorandum.
Head worked at the Kentucky Finance & Administration Cabinet. Using the online persona “Dr. Head” and the business name Dr. Head’s Meds, he marketed the drugs using code language such as “blue magic” or “energy vitamins,” the indictment stated.
Head abused his state-government email account to conduct his “illegal side business,” and likely did it on state work time, Assistant U.S. Attorney William P. Moynahan said in a sentencing memorandum.
Head lost his state job in 2020 because of the case, according to a court document.
The U.S. Attorney’s Office said the “drugs were not authorized for entry into the United States” and didn’t meet U.S. Food and Drug Administration labeling requirements, nor is Head a doctor or pharmacist, so he “had no legal authority to prescribe, dispense, transport or otherwise handle prescription medications.”
Even after U.S. Customs officers intercepted some of his shipments and he received warnings, Head allegedly made additional orders for generic erectile-dysfunction drugs using different addresses.
Kentucky State Police and the FDA Office of Criminal Investigations investigated the case.
Herald-Leader staff writer Bill Estep contributed to this report.
This story was originally published November 2, 2021 at 7:07 PM.
