A 52-year-old man alleging he landed in the hospital after taking a nearly fatal dose of diabetes medication is suing a Madras pharmacy, saying employees mistakenly dispensed the drug instead of his prescription painkiller.

Michael D. Cunningham, of Madras, filed the $107,000 suit against Safeway Inc. in Deschutes County Circuit Court this month in connection with an April 30 overdose, when he “experienced convulsions and became incoherent,” according to the complaint.

The lawsuit says the medication that caused his symptoms was dispensed by a pharmacist at the Safeway store in Madras.

Company representatives from Safeway’s Portland communications office did not return calls for comment Tuesday or Wednesday, nor respond to a copy of the complaint faxed and e-mailed to the office at a receptionist’s request.

Personal injury lawyer Bruce Brothers, who filed the lawsuit, said his client nearly died after taking several doses of Glyburide, a medication used to treat diabetes. Brothers said Cunningham thought the medication was a painkiller he took three times a day for chronic back pain.

The dose of the Glyburide that was dispensed to Cunningham was “roughly five times what a diabetic would take,” Brothers said.

The medications did not look similar, Brothers said, but Cunningham was given a receipt with a stamp on it “saying it was from a different manufacturer and that, even though it looked different, it was the right stuff.”

Cunningham’s wife called an ambulance on April 30 after he showed symptoms that included diarrhea, shaking, blurred vision and incoherence, according to the complaint.

“His blood-sugar level was 24 and below 20 is fatal,” Brothers said.

Cunningham was taken to Mountain View Hospital in Madras, where a nurse had his medication analyzed and the mistake was discovered, Brothers said.

Brothers said he discussed the matter with a Safeway claims adjuster but “never got a word back” after sending a letter to the company about the alleged medication mix-up.

The Oregon State Board of Pharmacy did not respond to calls or an e-mail inquiring about the frequency of medication-dispensation errors statewide.

But in October 2008, the board adopted a document “in response to the number of medication errors and medication distribution issues,” with 23 policy recommendations for local pharmacists, according to its Web site. The recommendations include routinely updating patient profiles to decrease the chance of drug allergies or negative interactions, monitoring patients for compliance with physicians’ directions, setting policies for appropriate pharmacy staffing levels, and policies for the security and storage of controlled substances.

In 2004, the Food and Drug Administration adopted a rule requiring bar-coding on nearly all prescription drug medications and blood donations that was expected to “prevent nearly 500,000 adverse events and transfusion errors over 20 years,” according to the FDA Web site.

A 2006 study published in the Annals of Internal Medicine tracked more than 370,000 doses of medication dispensed at a 735-bed hospital for eight months before the bar code rule went into effect and five months after it went into effect. The study showed an 85 percent reduction in the number of dispensation errors after bar codes were put into use.

Brothers said he has handled only one other case in the last 15 years making a similar claim and he believes such errors are rare.

“It’s very unusual,” Brothers said.

The case he filed against Safeway is scheduled for a pretrial hearing in October.