‘The Pharmacist’: Crusader for life

 

A passion for life
    

Then, as if beating those enormous odds and dealing with his family’s searing heartache were not enough, Schneider channeled his pain into a second crusade every bit as heroic if not quixotic – shutting down the state’s largest opioid mill in New Orleans East, paying homage to the son who was stolen from him by the drug underworld.
    

“I went at warp speed to do my best, “ Schneider said, “but there were so many things along the way, both in solving Danny’s murder and in the (opioid) case, where I said to God, ‘OK, God, you did this for me and I’m going to do this for you, but why are you making it so hard? Why, after telling me to go do this, do police get in my way and goons chase me?’ 
  

 “I didn’t really get angry with God, but it was kind of like, ‘Please, I believe in you, but I would believe more if this would have happened a little bit easier.’”
    

Schneider’s 20-year mission to secure a resolution to his 22-year-old son’s death and to protect young people like him has been transformed into a riveting Netflix documentary series titled, simply, “The Pharmacist.” 

The documentary already has garnered global acclaim for its exposure of the prescription drug crisis that claimed a half-million lives in the U.S. between 2000 and 2015. Sixty percent of those deaths were attributed to opioid overdoses.   
    

Schneider and his wife Annie, former residents of St. Bernard Parish until Hurricane Katrina, are now parishioners of Most Holy Trinity Parish in Covington, and their spiritual and emotional battles about the meaning of suffering pervade the four-episode series.
 

A Norman Rockwell life
    

Schneider played left tackle on the Chalmette High School team that made it all the way to the state semifinals in 1968. He and Annie, one year behind him in school, married in 1971 at St. Mark Church in Chalmette and had their first child, Danny Jr., in 1976.
    

Schneider worked late hours to get his pharmacy degree from Xavier University of Louisiana, and that job eventually provided a comfortable living – a two-story brick home in Chalmette and annual cross-country vacations for the family.
    

Schneider said he and his wife were Catholic by birth and heritage, but he admits they probably would have considered themselves “occasional” Catholics in those days.
    

“That was until my son’s death – and I hate to say that,” Schneider said. “For a very brief moment – maybe a week or less – I was angry at God, but I came around real quick. At first, it was not just love of God – it was desperation. Then it became love, and then it became an agreement. I actually started sensing that God was helping me. That’s when I started this bargaining thing. Me getting the killer in jail and me not getting killed in the process – that was almost a miracle. And then we just started going to church regularly.”
    

There were many heroes along the way – the woman, Shane Madding, who endangered her own life by identifying and then agreeing to testify against the killer despite persistent death threats; the pastor, Terence Reed of Lighthouse Ministries in the 9th Ward, who agreed to walk the streets, along with a cadre of African-American men recovering from drug and alcohol addictions, introducing the white pharmacist from Chalmette to residents while he posted flyers on telephone poles and knocked on doors.
    

“There’s a bunch of what I call mini-miracles,” Schneider said. “If you’re not a believer, some people would explain them away as coincidence. All my friends were on my case. My wife was on my case. The police were fighting me almost (to stop). I was very close to quitting.”
    

Just as he was prepared to give up his investigation, Schneider used an address-based telephone directory to call every house within a half-mile radius of Danny’s shooting. Almost everyone said they knew nothing or hung up. He finally got Shane Madding to tell him what happened, and her testimony led to Jeffrey Hall pleading guilty to manslaughter.
 

At the end of his rope
    

Schneider thought it was the end of an exhausting family saga, but as he continued to work at Bradley’s Pharmacy in Poydras, he noticed a disturbing flow of young people – about the age of his late son – bringing in prescriptions for OxyContin, Xanax and the muscle-relaxant Soma.
    

That three-drug package was known on the streets as the “Holy Trinity.”
    

About 90% of the prescriptions were written by Dr. Jacqueline Cleggett, a doctor of internal medicine and pediatrics who had opened a “pain management” clinic on Chef Menteur Highway in New Orleans East, just a few miles from the St. Bernard Parish line.
    

The young kids triggered an alarm in Schneider.
  

 “This wasn’t a middle-aged guy walking in who was working on an oyster boat who had hurt himself and had some legitimate pain,” Schneider said. “My son had died at 22, and these were 20-year-olds walking in, looking perfectly healthy. A ton of pharmacies were seeing this, in all fairness. And, like everybody else, if you haven’t had something really horrible happen to you, it’s kind of not your job (to question it). So, you know, the authorities should handle it.”
    

But because of what happened to his son, Schneider felt compelled not to look the other way, although, once again, he knew he would be throwing his family into a maelstrom of drugs and potential violence.
    

Schneider said the day his son’s killer was sentenced, he received a call out of the blue from his son’s former guidance counselor and creative writing teacher at Archbishop Hannan High School, Duane Darcey, asking if he might want to share his experiences with the students there.
    

“He gave the post powerful anti-drug presentation I have ever witnessed,” said former Hannan principal John Serio.
 

A sign in the sky
    

Then, as the Schneiders and a few friends were driving back from Minnesota following a New Orleans Saints playoff game in January 2001, Schneider believes he got another sign from God.
    

Just after sunrise, Schneider was driving south of Chicago, when he was discussing with family friend Debbie Marino whether or not he should pursue the pain doctor’s suspicious activity.
    

“I told her, ‘I don’t think my family’s ready for this, and I don’t know if I want to go into the investigation phase again,’” Schneider said.
    

Marino replied immediately: “You’re going to do it.”
    

Schneider said since he had been making bargains with God until this point, he told Marino, “God would have to give me a sign immediately.”
    

Just then, Schneider looked through his windshield and saw a clearly defined cloud formation in the shape of a cross.
    

“Debbie, do you see what I see?” Schneider asked.
    

She confirmed that she saw the cross, as did Schneider’s wife and daughter.
 

Definitely not doctors’ hours
    

The Schneiders got back to the New Orleans area around midnight, and the pharmacist remembered that many people coming into his store to have their prescriptions filled told him Cleggett worked late hours – well past midnight – at her clinic.
    

“So, now it’s about 2 o’clock in the morning and we pull up to the clinic and park across the street to videotape,” Schneider said. “My wife sees this and she goes, ‘Oh, my God. It’s 2 o’clock in the morning, and there’s a hundred people there!’
    

“There were actually cabs pulling up, parking and then the people would run inside and then come back into the cab and leave. When I went out there, I didn’t think it was going to be as bad as my patients had been telling me. It was way worse.”
    

Schneider eventually delivered his videotapes and prescription evidence to the FBI and the DEA, which had been conducting their own, behind-the-scenes investigations. Because of his discouraging experience with the police in his son’s killing – and because of the voluminous evidence he had already collected – Schneider said he wondered why it was taking so long for the federal authorities to put Cleggett out of business.
    

He began working with the Louisiana State Board of Medical Examiners, who told him he needed a “smoking gun” to have her license suspended.
 

The ‘smoking gun’ 
    

He finally got that when a young woman, who weighed about 110 pounds, walked into his pharmacy with prescriptions for the “Holy Trinity,” which Schneider said could have killed her if taken as prescribed.
    

With pharmacy workers listening in on a speaker phone, Schneider finally got Cleggett on the phone, and she affirmed that she had written the prescriptions.
    

When Schneider told her that could lead to a fatal overdose, the doctor replied, “Who made you a … physician?” and then hung up.
    

Schneider had secured the “smoking gun,” and Cleggett, who later was permanently injured in a serious car wreck, pleaded guilty to one of 37 counts of conspiring to dispense and distribute a controlled substance.
 

Saving others like Danny
    

Now that his crusade to protect others has raised awareness of the dangers of opioids and other controlled substances being used and sold on the black market, Schneider hopes his efforts will save other lives.
    

His story has been a major  impetus for an umbrella federal lawsuit, centered in Cleveland, in which dozens of states and municipalities are seeking compensation from various pharmaceutical companies for failing to properly warn consumers about the addictive properties of OxyContin and other prescription medications.
    

“The whole reason I did this, in addition to my commitment to God, is to save lives,” Schneider said. “One life is worth it, but I’m not trying to save just one life. I want to save hundreds of lives, and I’ll lay it on the line for as long as I can. God is all over this thing.”
    

Another God miracle, Schneider said, occurred when he and his wife became parishioners of Most Holy Trinity Parish in Covington after Katrina. Before the young parish built its permanent church, it was worshipping in a converted store in a strip shopping mall. There were no airs about the parish. Itinerant since Katrina, the Schneiders felt suddenly at peace in the make-do space.
    

The altar for the temporary church came from a battered church in St. Bernard Parish  – St. Mark in Chalmette – that had been swallowed up by the storm in 2005. It was the same altar where Dan and Annie Schneider had exchanged marriage vows in 1971.
    

Peter Finney Jr. can be reached at [email protected].