The owner of a now-closed Burlington pharmacy pleaded guilty Wednesday in Seattle’s U.S. District Court to illegally filling online prescriptions of the highly addictive narcotic hydrocodone.

Charles S. Reed, 55, a resident of Mount Vernon and owner of Horen’s Drugs on Fairhaven Avenue in Burlington, pleaded guilty to the charge of acquiring a controlled substance by misrepresentation and subterfuge. He faces up to four years in prison and a $250,000 fine. Reed will be sentenced June 20 in Seattle.

“He was basically a mail-order company for hydrocodone,” Assistant U.S. Attorney Ronald Friedman said after Wednesday’s plea hearing. “By the guilty plea, he’s recognized that what he was doing was wrong.”

A federal investigation found Horen’s Drug was providing prescriptions to mail-order drug customers via the Internet without the customers having direct contact with a physician. The Web sites through which Horen’s filled prescriptions had customers fill out online health questionnaires or submit “supposed” medical records, the Seattle U.S. Attorney’s Office said in a news release.

Federal and state laws say prescriptions are illegal if they aren’t based on a valid patient-physician relationship, which includes a patient being examined by a physician before writing a prescription.

Reed was disciplined in 2003 for filling prescriptions over the Internet that were not based on valid doctor-patient relationships. He agreed to stop filling Internet prescriptions at that time, according to the U.S. Attorney’s Office.

But Reed began to fill Internet prescriptions again in 2007, and Horen’s Drug was the state’s No. 1 supplier of hydrocodone in 2007 before the Drug Enforcement Administration suspended its the federal controlled substance registration in late November.

At the time, Reed’s wife, Yvonne Reed, had told the Skagit Valley Herald that her husband had researched Internet pharmacies and “felt he was doing the right thing.” She hung up on a reporter seeking comment Wednesday. Reed’s attorney, a federal public defender, could not be reached late Wednesday.

Horen’s Drugs remained open for business after the suspension in November, though it could not dispense controlled substances. However, a message on the pharmacy’s answering machine Wednesday indicated the store had “closed the doors for good” due to “health problems.”

Friedman hoped Wednesday’s guilty plea would send a message to other Internet pharmacies.

“It’s all just a pill mill,” Friedman said. “Nobody’s trying to discern whether (patients) should be having these drugs or not. All these Internet companies should be aware that they’re in violation (of the) law and then, one by one, they’re prosecuted.”

Nearly all the prescriptions Reed filled for Web sites, which included http://www.themedicineplace.com and http://www.1stoppainshop.com, were for hydrocodone.

Reed had credentials as a pharmacist in Washington since 1979. He is no longer listed in the Washington Department of Health’s online credentials database.

* Franny White can be reached at 360-416-2148 or .