Pharmacy Mixes Up 9-Year-Old’s ADHD Medicine, Gives Him Opioid More Powerful Than Morphine

A pharmacy mixed up a nine-year-old’s ADHD medicine, giving him a powerfully addictive opioid meant for another customer instead.

Sarah Paquin says her 9-year-old son, Declan, takes dextroamphetamine for his ADHD. It’s a commonly prescribed stimulant that Declan had been taking for years. As Sarah tells PEOPLE, her husband, David, was about to give him the medication, which they’d picked up from Shoppers Drug Mart pharmacy in Comox, B.C., on May 28.

“It’s very chaotic in the morning, and if my husband had just been distracted with the other two, or been tired from being up with the baby the night before, this could have ended totally differently,” Sarah, who has a 3-year-old and 10-month-old, tells PEOPLE.

That’s when David looked at the bottle, and realized he was holding someone else’s prescription — and it was for hydromorphone. It’s a profoundly strong opioid, the U.S. Drug Enforcement Agency explains, with “potency approximately two to eight times greater than that of morphine and has a rapid onset of action.”

As the National Library of Medicine says, “Accidental ingestion or intentional abuse can lead to overdose and potentially life-threatening respiratory depression.”

In a statement to PEOPLE, Loblaw Companies Ltd., which owns Shoppers Drug Mart, said, “Upon review with the store, we have learned this was a case of human error, one that never should have happened. We have controls in place to minimize risks like this – where the patient was handed the wrong prescription bag – and the Associate will review these with employees to avoid a similar situation in the future. The owner of this location has reached out to the patient’s parents to apologize for any undue stress this may have caused, and to outline the corrective steps.”

“Thankfully my husband caught it before he took any of it,” Sarah says, sharing the pills they’d been given were a 5 mg dose of the powerful opioid. “To do that to a 9-year-old child, it would have been devastating,” she tells PEOPLE.

She says her family has filed an official complaint with the College of Pharmacists of British Columbia a regulatory agency, and part of the complaint, she says, is “we would like some more strong and strict procedures put in place for picking up such strong heavy medications, especially when they pertain to a child.”

Her son’s medicine, she said, was eventually found in the pharmacy’s outgoing box. However, they won’t be returning there for their prescriptions.