Iron County Deputy Wade Lee says two of the men admitted to being illegal aliens. The driver said he's been delivering prescription drugs for a company called "Nevada Courier" for several months. Lee explains, "He said ‘I was sitting at home and somebody called me and paid me $150 and a tank of gas to drive these medications down here and drop them off.'"
Police say the men are from Las Vegas. They had made a delivery in Mesquite, two in Saint George, and their fourth delivery would have been in Cedar City. Lee says, "I called Wal-Mart and they said yeah they were expecting a delivery and the driver was late."
We called Wal-Mart with some questions. In an email statement, a Wal-Mart spokesperson writes, "This situation is unacceptable to Wal-Mart. We maintain strict standards for courier companies that transport products for us. As this was a situation involving a contractor, your questions would need to be addressed by the courier company or the police."
Iron County Sheriffs say what's frightening here is the safety of Wal-Mart pharmacy customers. Lee says, "You don't know if they opened the box, no tamper seals, nothing... so you never know what you're going to get I guess."
And now you know how Walmart keeps their drug prices so low.
]]>The article doesn't really say, but a courier company wouldn't typically hire 3 people to make one delivery of prescription drugs. I'm guessing the driver was on their list of available drivers, they gave him $150 and money for a tank of gas to make the days deliveries, and he had a couple of illegal alien buddies jump in with him for the trip.
]]>They said they were from Las Vegas, and delivered to Mesquite, St. George, and Cedar City. They were pulled over in Iron County, which is in Southwestern Utah.
There's probably 3-4 hours between those cities. So it would have been an all day trip there and back. You'd probably make about $15/hr.
Throw a couple of illegal alien buddies, and it would make a nice road trip.
]]>Have you ever been to Iron County, Utah?
"Nevada Courier" is probably the only service that delivers there.
]]>@BarryCaesar:
The linked article said there was no tamper tape on the boxes.
Agreed
]]>I have to agree, this is most likely the courier service's problem. If the courier service delivered it the proper way the first few times, how could Walmart know that stuff was up?
As for alteration, I wouldn't be surprised if, although the entire package wasn't sealed, that the individual drug packages WERE.
Still, this is going to be one fired courier service.
]]>This company doesn't sound too professional if they hire drivers that speed and also smoke while on duty. The company we contract with won't even let their drivers wear shorts in the summer - as it would not prtray a "professional" appearance.
]]>Which I'm sick of hearing about. If you think they have all the good jobs, then your scope of reasoning isn't all that broad.
]]>@MooseOfReason: There are places along the Texas border where the city police department answers the phone in Spanish. Call the Roma, TX PD (from a local number - caller ID) and see how they answer the phone.
]]>@ajlei: As a person with no health insurance.. I am very.. very thankful that WalMart can provide the same exact prescription drugs as other pharmacies for substantially less money.. When I used to buy my pills at Walgreens they charged me close to 35 dollars a month.. Now at WalMart I only pay 9.. That is less than my prescription copay used to be when I did have insurance.
I love WalMart pharmacy for that.. and I'm sure there are LOTS of Americans that feel the same way I do.
]]>We maintain strict standards for courier companies that transport products for us.
Right. I think it is one "Strict standard" The dirt cheapest company available. End of standards.
]]>It's called "security by obscurity" and it's very common. Lots of websites have admin areas unprotected by passwords, you just have to know the URL.
In the case of drugs being transported by unarmed couriers, same thing... couriers probably don't know when dispatched what they're picking up; people looking to steal have no idea who the couriers are that have the goods.
In the same way, a lot of delivery trucks with high-value products (think a 40 foot truck full of $300 Intel CPUs or terabyte hard drives) do not have the name of the company whose products they're delivering on them, to reduce the likelihood of being robbed.
]]>The only thing that seems to have gone wrong here is the speeding and the pot smoking of the couriers. I don't think they will hire that courier service again however.
]]>@ajlei:
Aside from them help you miss 1 of the worst movies of the year whats the problem?
]]>Ah yes. Because Walmart is the only one with a cheap or discounted drug program...
]]>/hypnotic
]]>@BarryCaesar: Yeah, this courier company seems a bit questionable. I used to work part time as reciever for a drug store and all the drugs came in boxes that were covered in tamper tape.
The reciept slip listed all the box numbers, the type of box that they should be and the total number of boxes. It also came with a slip listing the contents of each box.
]]>I'm not even close to retirement, but hey. Sign me up. As an added bonus I won't speed or do any illegal drugs on the job.
]]>It happens in WalMart, Target, KMart, stores in the mall, the various grocery stores, the fast-food places, the gas station (last weekend I had to hold up three fingers because the clerk couldn't understand "three") - and even the doctor's office. It is not uncommon AT ALL to encounter floor staff and cashiers who speak little to no English - and they hardly ever need to.
According to a recent local study, more than 70% of El Pasoans speak Spanish at home, and as many as 30% (some studies say ~20-25%) speak no English whatsoever. I want to emphasize here that I AM NOT talking about illegal immigrants - or even legal immigrants. I'm talking about people who were born, as were their parents and grandparents, here in the USA. At least two people that I went to high school with had enough English to get through school, but stopped bothering it when they graduated, and now they don't speak or appear to understand any at all. (I lived in Japan for two years, and got to where I could carry on a rudimentary conversation... with a four year old... but a few years of not practicing it, and it's all gone. I assume the same is true for them.)
It's very difficult to get a job where you have any contact with the public if you're not bilingual (Eng/Span) - but "bilingual" often translates to "Can you speak Spanish?" A friend of mine interviewed for a position that asked for "bilingual;" the interviewer's first question was [in Spanish] "Do you speak Spanish?" and the rest of the interview was conducted in Spanish. It's understandable to make sure that an applicant is in fact *fluent* in Spanish if it's a requirement for the job, but the English side of "bilingual" was completely ignored.
Even jobs where you DON'T have contact with the public, sometimes, it comes into play. I currently do medical transcription for a medical group, and a few years ago one of the doctors made a big stink about some of us in the transcription department not being bilingual. He was reading off the patients' medical history forms - their previous illnesses, medications, allergies, surgeries, social and family history, etc - in Spanish (for the ones that were written in Spanish), and became irate that we couldn't understand it to type it. Five of us were faced with the possibility of losing our jobs over this. Fortunately, three of us were the top producers in the department, and someone in management got a clue and said that if it has to be transmitted to the insurance company in English, it should be dictated in English, so it all came to nothing.
My point is, there are some areas of the country where it's not uncommon AT ALL for employees to be fluent in Spanish, but not in English, and it is not seen as a problem or poor management. If a problem *is* recognized, it's that the English-only speakers don't know the predominant local language. Bottom line, around here, if you have an English-only clerk and a Spanish-only clerk, the English-only clerk is going to cost the company more hassle and lost customers than the Spanish-only clerk.
]]>Awesome.
DHS, are you listening?
]]>For the most part, it is a fairly secure system. The couriers in our department were required to pass a criminal background check every 3 months. When we did have drugs in our vehicles, they were required to be locked at all times and we weren't allowed to make any "extra" stops until all the drugs had been delivered.
As for this being Walmart's fault, it really isn't. They probably needed some medication that was either not in their order (that the supplier screwed up) or had a "rush" delivery for some medication they needed for a patient. Either way, this is on the drug supplier (who is responsible for delivery of the drugs) and the courier service they chose to deliver them. This is not Walmarts fault.
]]>BS....next time you need one....remember you will be at fault for anything the illiterates they hire.
]]>Stop it.
]]>Seriously though, 30k worth of narcotics being transported like that seems like such an easy target.
]]>That being said, working there still sucked.
]]>How long of a trip is this? $150.00 and a tank of gas sounds like a good deal. I'm sure there lots of responsible semi-retired peeps that would be interested.
And I don't think this is Wal-Marts mistake.
As far as I know Target gets theirs along with other inventory for the store, they show up in the red shipping bins with lids. I don't know if they seal the bins or not but they at least have the ability to seal said bins.
What the heck is Walmart doing using unscreened couriers?
]]>It sounds like the courier will certainly be in trouble, but Walmart's self-serving statement is lame and incomplete. It doesn't do any good to have "strict standards for courier companies" if you don't bother enforce them. Not a word in Walmart's statement about looking into what happened, or about correcting the outrageous lapse in responsibility. Just a cavalier take-your-questions-elsewhere statement.
]]>A: A pulse.
]]>or anywhere?, just yesterday a woman on her first day at McDonalds screwed up our order twice and looked very confused when looking at the buttons on the register. I'm glad she didn't smoke weed and drive 100mph (or does she?) but still shouldn't there be proper training or atleast backround checks?
]]>Waiting for the "We are taking this seriously" moment...
]]>Courier companies exist in every city in the US, and with few exceptions, all of them use independent contractors, who generally provide their own cars, bicycles, or motorcycles. It's well known that a lot of couriers take these jobs because they are completely flexible on time and schedule, and my friends who were couriers for different companies in different parts of the US said their own experience was that a lot of couriers were illegal aliens or had drug problems.
If Rite-Aid or any other large pharmacy chain uses couriers occasionally to move product between locations, they are probably also guilty of having people like this make occasional deliveries for them.
Now... there may be a *different* issue surrounding appropriate transportation of narcotic medications, and that depends on whether or not State or Federal laws require that narcotics be transported in secure packaging. I don't know, but it would seem to me that there may be such a law that went into place after the Tylenol problem some 20 years ago.
]]>