---
title: "The Board Struck Him Off Over 41 Prescriptions. It Never Asked About The Address."
dek: "Forty-five years sealed, then released under a records law with no exemption for closed cases. A paediatric pharmacologist costed the quantities: 231 child-months of night sedation, for eleven children aged seven to thirteen, delivered to a single door."
kind: analysis (Analysis)
desk: The Body
author: Loretta Sung (fictional)
published: 2026-08-24T12:00:00Z
url: https://theyburied.com/article/forty-one-scripts-one-address
tags: Project Monarch, prescribing, medical boards, sedation, records law, 1981
genre: satire
status: fiction — nothing in this story happened; every person, source and document is invented
---

# The Board Struck Him Off Over 41 Prescriptions. It Never Asked About The Address.

*Forty-five years sealed, then released under a records law with no exemption for closed cases. A paediatric pharmacologist costed the quantities: 231 child-months of night sedation, for eleven children aged seven to thirteen, delivered to a single door.*

Forty-one prescriptions. Eleven patients. One delivery address.

Between 3 September 1978 and 11 June 1980, Dr. Ellery Vaughn-Tasker wrote forty-one prescriptions for eleven children he had never examined, and every one of them went to the same door.

A state medical board established all of that in 1981, on its own papers, in three months. It struck him off for record-keeping.

The file has been shut for forty-five years. A records act amended in 2019 stopped exempting closed professional matters, nobody appears to have tested it, and in February the whole thing — 214 pages — arrived in the post.

## What forty-one prescriptions come to

We stripped the file down to quantities, dates and ages, took the prescriber's name and the address off it, and sent it to a paediatric clinical pharmacologist who was told nothing else.

Three drugs. Chloral hydrate syrup, 41.5 litres across twenty-two prescriptions. Chlorpromazine, 6,000 tablets at 25 milligrams across thirteen. Secobarbital, 1,800 capsules at 50 milligrams across six.

Dr. Perdita Sandoval-Waite costed the totals against the 1978 paediatric tables and returned a figure rather than an opinion: 231 child-months. Eleven children, twenty-one months, a sedative dose on roughly four nights in five, without a break.

She added a second observation nobody had asked her for. In twenty-one months this prescriber wrote no antibiotic, no anticonvulsant, no inhaler, no antipyretic — nothing that treats a child who has been looked at.

> Forty-one prescriptions and not one of them treats anything. Three drugs, and all three of them put a child to sleep.
>
> — Dr. Perdita Sandoval-Waite

> **Figure:** Forty-one prescriptions, one hearing of forty-one minutes, and forty-five years — see https://theyburied.com/article/forty-one-scripts-one-address

## The question that was asked once

The hearing on 19 May 1981 lasted forty-one minutes. Vaughn-Tasker contested nothing.

Somebody on the panel asked what the address was. He said it was a residential school.

On the reverse of the agenda sheet, a clerk wrote nine words in pencil: *Asked re address. Told residential school. Not pursued — scope.*

That is the pivot of this story and it is the least dramatic object in the file. It is initialled, it is not dated, and it sits on the back of a page, which is why the wire service that reported the release two weeks ago did not have it.

## The address

In August this desk published four fiscal years of one department's disbursements under [object code 7714](/article/object-code-7714) — nursing hours, a drugs account, a night rate and a salaried psychologist, charged to a code for building upkeep. Nine buildings. All nine identified by asset number only, with the schedule that turns an asset number into a street still sealed.

Released in the same tranche, and apparently not read by anybody who redacted it, was a staffing annex: thirty-four contracted clinicians, listed by name against an asset number, with a printed return address for timesheets.

The printed return address is on Ferngate Road. It is the address on all forty-one prescriptions.

Vaughn-Tasker is the ninth name on the annex.

So the answer to the question the board asked once, and did not ask twice, is that the address was a facility of the programme, and the man delivering to it was on its staffing list, and both of those things were established by documents the state itself made and kept.

## What a board is and is not for

The registrar's reply is at the foot of this page and it is the most useful thing here.

He is right that a medical board licenses; it does not investigate premises. He is right that permanent revocation is the heaviest order available, and that a panel intending leniency does not reach for it. He is right that "records" was what could be proved in the room.

And then, defending the board, he goes to page 188 and tells us what we had not found: on 8 June 1981 the board's counsel referred the address to another state agency, by name. It was acknowledged on 16 June. There is no reply in the file, no reply in the correspondence register, and nobody chased it.

A body that does one thing well and hands on the rest is not a scandal. A body that hands on the rest and never asks what became of it is how a thing like this stays quiet for forty-five years.

## His daughter

Marion Vaughn-Tasker Kell is seventy-one and taught in a middle school for thirty-four years. She read the file before we wrote a word of this.

She did not defend her father and she did not disown him. She asked for one thing: that he not be made the whole of it.

"He is one name," she said. "You have thirty-three others and you have printed his because he is dead and cannot sue you."

She is right. He was caught by a quarterly register check at a drugstore, which is the only reason we can see him at all. The other thirty-three were never audited by anybody.

That is the story this desk is now on: not the man the system caught, but the thirty-three it did not.

## Sources (invented)

- The 1981 disciplinary file, 214 pages: charge sheet, hearing agenda, transcript notes, exhibit schedule, finding, and the referral memorandum — Requested under the state records act in November 2025 and released in February 2026 with no redactions beyond patient names (Released 11 February 2026)
- Dr. Perdita Sandoval-Waite, Paediatric clinical pharmacologist; writes dosing guidance for a children's hospital group — Commissioned blind: given quantities, dates, ages and the 1978 dosing tables, and told nothing about the prescriber or the address (March–June 2026)
- Corwin B. Halliwell-Adeyemi, Registrar of the state medical board, in post since 2014 — Sent the complete file, the pharmacology note and the full draft on 3 July 2026, with no deadline set (July 2026)
- Marion Vaughn-Tasker Kell, Retired schoolteacher; Dr. Vaughn-Tasker's daughter, and his only surviving child — Approached in writing, interviewed twice at her home in May and July 2026, and shown the file before publication (May and July 2026)
- Elspeth Corrigan-Amadi, Retired state pharmacy inspector, twenty-nine years — Interviewed by telephone twice and shown the 1981 audit sheet with the prescriber's name masked (April 2026)

## What we could not confirm

- What the buildings at the other eight asset numbers are. The staffing annex gives us one street for one asset number, which is one more than anybody had in August. The schedule that would map the remaining eight has been described as 'in accession' since 2019, is in nobody's admitted custody, and our request for it is nine weeks old.
- Whether the eleven children were ever compensated, or ever asked. We hold initials and years of birth, we have not sought their names, and we would not print them. What we have asked the state comptroller is a narrower question — whether any claim was ever paid to a person born in those years and resident at that address — and the comptroller has neither answered it nor refused it.
- Whether the other thirty-three names on the staffing annex prescribed at all. Nineteen were licensed in other states, ten have no disciplinary record anywhere we can search, and four are names too common to resolve. We have filed in four states. Vaughn-Tasker is the one we can see because he is the one who was caught.

## Right of reply

**Corwin B. Halliwell-Adeyemi, registrar of the state medical board** (Replied 25 July 2026, asking that it be printed in full. Printed entire and unedited, including the passages about this newspaper.):

> You have written to me as though a medical board is an investigative agency. It is not one, it has never been one, and I am going to defend my predecessors on that point before I say anything else.
> 
> The jurisdiction of this board is a licence. That is the whole of it. We can suspend a licence, condition it, or revoke it. We cannot enter a building. We cannot compel a person who is not a licensee to answer a question. We have no power to require any institution in this state to tell us who lives there, and we did not have that power in 1981 either. When your piece asks why the board did not follow the address, it is asking why a body with a licensing power did not exercise an inspection power it does not possess.
> 
> On the charge. You write that he was struck off 'for paperwork', and I understand why the sentence is attractive. The finding of 4 June 1981 revoked his licence permanently. Permanent revocation was, and remains, the most severe order this board can make. There is no order above it. A panel that intends leniency does not reach for the maximum. Whatever your clerk wrote in pencil, the outcome was the outcome you get for the worst thing we are allowed to find.
> 
> As to why the finding is framed around records rather than around children: records is what was provable in the time and on the evidence before the panel. The prescriptions existed. The absence of examination notes existed. Both were admitted. Anything beyond that would have required the board to establish what happened at a premises it could not enter, to patients it could not identify, on testimony it could not compel. A panel that charges what it cannot prove loses, and a licensee who wins keeps prescribing. My predecessors charged the thing that would stick. I would have done the same and I would do it now.
> 
> I will not, however, tell you that nobody at this board wondered. Page 188 of the file you have is a memorandum from the board's counsel, dated 8 June 1981, referring the matter of the delivery address to another agency of this state, by name. It was sent. It was acknowledged on 16 June. There is no reply in our file and there is no reply in our correspondence register, and I have looked, because your letter obliged me to look. Nobody here chased it, and I cannot tell you that anybody here should have, because it was not ours to chase once it went out of the door.
> 
> That is the honest shape of it. This board did the thing it was built to do, promptly, at the maximum severity available, and then handed the part it was not built to do to a body that was, and never heard back, and closed the file. I am not going to pretend that is a satisfying account. It is an accurate one.
> 
> One further matter, and I raise it because you did not. You have obtained this file because a records act was amended in 2019 in a way nobody at the time seems to have thought applied to us. It does apply to us. Since your request we have identified four hundred and six closed disciplinary files from 1958 onward that are now public and were not being treated as public. They will be listed on our website by the end of October, indexed by year, with the exhibit schedules. I would rather you had that from me than found it out.

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They Buried is a satirical newspaper. Every story, source, document and person in it is invented. It reports from a fictional world in which the conspiracy theories are true, with the method of a real daily.