Nancy Coffey is a former, high-ranking official of the U.S. Drug Enforcement Administration who routinely advises healthcare businesses on controlled substance laws and regulations. Her career spans 32 years inside the agency that decides when DEA registrants get inspected, suspended, or revoked.
Healthcare operators that touch controlled substances - pharmacies, distributors, manufacturers, importers - face DEA enforcement that runs on a different set of rules than the rest of healthcare regulation. Nancy spent three decades building, running, and managing that enforcement program from the inside; her practice now applies that institutional knowledge to the defense side.
As DEA Diversion Program Manager for New Jersey, Nancy oversaw the full state-wide controlled substance diversion enforcement program. That role spans the criminal, civil, and administrative tracks: investigators, inspectors, agents, and inter-agency liaison work. The Diversion Program Manager is the senior decision-maker on whether to escalate a registrant matter from administrative inspection through to Order to Show Cause and license revocation.
Nancy also served as DEA Diversion Program Manager for the six-state New England Division. The New England Division covers a particularly concentrated stretch of the U.S. pharmaceutical supply chain: large independent pharmacy populations, a dense distributor and 3PL footprint, and significant manufacturer presence. Running diversion enforcement across that supply chain gave Nancy line-of-sight into how DEA approaches every actor in the controlled substance lifecycle - from registration through suspicious order monitoring (SOM) through diversion investigation and revocation proceedings.
Throughout her DEA career, Nancy served as the agency's liaison with federal, state, and local agencies across the pharmaceutical and chemical supply chains. Controlled substance enforcement frequently runs in parallel with state board of pharmacy action, state attorney general inquiries, U.S. Attorney's Office prosecutions, and HHS-OIG matters. The liaison role gave Nancy a direct working relationship with how those agencies coordinate, what triggers a referral, and where the procedural seams are. The defense use of that perspective is direct: it shapes how a registrant should be positioned across multiple enforcement tracks at once.
At Health Law Alliance, Nancy advises pharmacies, distributors, manufacturers, importers, and other DEA registrants on the full controlled substance compliance lifecycle - from initial registration through DEA inspection, administrative show-cause proceedings, and civil and criminal investigations. Her work integrates with the firm's former-prosecutor and senior-healthcare-executive bench when matters cross from administrative DEA action into U.S. Attorney's Office territory. Healthcare businesses that operate in the controlled substance space rely on her for the institutional perspective that only three decades inside DEA can produce.
Matters Nancy personally leads - drawing on 32 years inside DEA's diversion enforcement program.
Consultations are confidential and protected by attorney-client privilege. Our team responds within one business day - often sooner when time is of the essence.
