Haverhill Woman Receives 4.5 Year Federal Prison Sentence for Taking and Using Patient’s Morphine

John Joseph Moakley United States Courthouse. (Beyond My Ken, Creative Commons.))

A Haverhill licensed practical nurse was sentenced Wednesday to four-and-a half years in prison for drug tampering.

Lauren Perrin, 47, was sentenced in federal court in Boston by U.S. Senior District Court Judge Mark L. Wolf. Besides prison, she was sentenced to three years of supervised release. As WHAV previously reported, Perrin pleaded guilty in September to one count of tampering with a consumer product, specifically morphine, which is used for pain relief.

While working as a licensed practical nurse at Maplewood Care and Rehabilitation Center in Amesbury, U.S. Attorney Andrew Lelling said, Perrin took morphine sulfate from three bottles prescribed to a hospice patient for her own personal use. In an attempt to avoid detection, she replaced the extracted morphine with cough syrup. Perrin’s tampering lowered the potency of the three bottles of morphine sulfate to only 4-29% of the intended potency. The victim was given the diluted morphine and deprived of necessary pain relief in the weeks before her death.

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