Ontario man disturbed to find bag of pills in Amazon order box

A Vaughan, Ont., man is baffled and looking for answers from Amazon after the shipping giant sent him an art supply set intended for his eight-year-old niece with a small plastic bag of unmarked pills inside the shipping box.

Amazon has apologized for the error and told him it is investigating, but Vishal Solanki says more needs to be done.

“I am absolutely pissed off, angry, shocked and annoyed,” Solanki wrote in an Instagram post late last week.

“It very well could be somebody’s prescription pills, but why in a baggie like that?” he said in a phone interview with CBC News Monday evening.

Solanki said he ordered a 142-piece wood art set for his niece via Amazon Prime on Nov. 19. It arrived at his door the next day.

Usually, he would just wrap a gift like this right in the box, but it was unmarked, which was unusual, he said. So he opened the box to make sure what he ordered was inside.

“I cut open the box and what fell out of the box shocked me and has me extremely disturbed and upset,” he wrote.

Inside was a small bag with an assortment of pills of various sizes and colours. Two appeared to be enclosed in pharmaceutical packaging, while the rest were loose in the bag.

Solanki says he didn’t open the bag, and doesn’t know what kind of drugs it contains.

“My big concern is … to an eight-year-old, she could think, ‘Oh, my uncle put some candy in the bag,'” he said.

Amazon didn’t respond to a request from CBC Toronto for comment.

Solanki did provide an email he received from Amazon, which said, in part, that “sometimes unavoidable mistakes happen.”

“I’ve escalated this issue on to the shipping department with high priority so that they’ll carry out a thorough investigation on this and will ensure that this doesn’t happen again for your future orders,” the message reads.

Amazon also said in the email that the company was sending a replacement art set at no charge.

“There is no need to return the wrong item. I request you to dispose of it,” an Amazon representative said in the email.

Solanki told CBC News he spoke with Amazon customer service on Monday, and he was assured that someone would figure out what happened.

“It was just very strange,” he said. “My main concern is if a child opened it and ingests it, that could be a much bigger issue.”

CBC