Forgery To Get Drugs

Press, Volume CV, Issue 31004, 9 March 1966, Page 19

Forgery To Get Drugs

(N.Z. Pres* Association) WELLINGTON. March 7. A seaman who forged prescriptions to get drug tablets was remanded for sentence in the Magistrate’s Court today. Philippus Jacobus Van Meerden, aged 31, pleaded guilty to 19 charges of forging prescriptions earlier this year. Over 1100 tablets were involved. Detective-Sergeant B. A. Toomey said Van Meerden forged prescriptions for up to 84 tablets a time to support an addiction that required him to take 60 tablets a day. The cost of the tablets to the Social Security Department was £lO 15s, said Sergeant Toomey. Van Meerden also pleaded guilty to having possession of 50 tablets and to stealing a 6d pad of prescription forms from the Wellington Hospital Board. On these and the forgery charges he was remanded a week for sentence. On a charge of absenting himself from the ship Arabic at Auckland on December 16, 1965, he pleaded guilty, was fined £lO and ordered to be held in custody pending deportation.

Captured Churchill.—Com-mandant-General A. J. de la Rey, who captured Winston Churchill when a war correspondent during the South African War after a Boer commando had ambushed an armoured train near Estcourt has celebrated his ninetieth birthday in Pretoria.