Carrying prescription drugs when traveling

It seems to me that physicians and pharmacists advise patients planning to travel, to take along their prescription drugs when they go. Can this cause problems when going through customs, for example? The problem with illicit drug traffic being what it is, there should be means by which people who must take medication regularly can carry it with them on trips, without running afoul of the law (U. S. or anywhere else)…

I travel a great deal and take a large no. of medications with me for my family. No one has ever bothered at any customs point to check. Its always best to carry a copy of all the names of medications you take with you signed by the physician. They will never bother you if you have that.


Anger is just one letter short of Danger

Eleanor Roosevelt

Thanks, MadSam. :slight_smile:

Either of the following will generally satisfy Customs officials:

  1. Keeping all medication in the original bottles from the pharmacy (with drug name, your name, & your physician’s name on the label)

  2. This often takes up a lot more space than necessary. If you do transfer your pills to organizers or pill boxes, a letter from your physician with your name on it listing all of meds you’re taking, as suggested by MadSam is advisable.


Sue from El Paso

Experience is what you get when you didn’t get what you wanted.

You must keep your prescription in its original bottle. It’s the law. I saw someone get busted on Cops once for carrying their own prescription without a bottle.


I am the user formerly known as puffington.

As a diabetic, I used to worry what customs officials both in the US and overseas would think about my insulin/syringes. Also, I was once concerned about people seeing me drawing a syringe in a restroom, etc. What I discovered, after many years of traveling to and from Europe and South America, is that US customs/airport officials don’t care in the least, and if anything the Europeans care even less. I have been told by co-workers who have traveled to Muslim countries that bringing syringes/medicines in can cause unusual scrutiny, but cannot confirm this.


The Prince: “Did you kill Jahamaraj Jah?”
Lady: “Yes.”
The Prince: “My Gods! Why?”
Lady: “His existence offended me.”

neutron star:

You can be busted by cops for merely being in their vicinity.

I was once traveling in my car some dozen blocks from my home in Berkeley, back in the days of street riots and the mad hiring, in this town, of whatever would fill a uniform and look like a cop under a plastic shield. A woman and I dented fenders just a bit at a residential intersection with no stop signs. She started acting problematically, so I naïvely called the police to check out the scene.

A cop came, and after looking at the fenders, got into my car and checked the brakes. He felt this gave him access to search the car from where he sat, so he felt around under the seats and found one capsule, of a drug I had had prescribed to try to alleviate irritation in my defective nose, which capsule I didn’t know had fallen there under the driver’s seat.

I recognized then what it was and told him, and also told him he could come to my house, a mile away, and inspect the container in which it was given to me, which container had the prescription for it on it. (The drug, I seem to recall, was Dilantin and didn’t turn out to work to quell my nasal irritation.) He refused and took me down to the station, saying that if it was contraband he would he would get recognition, and if was not, it would be no skin off his nose. At the station, he checked the capsule’s colors against color pictures of various capsules, to determine if it contained a barbiturate. Well, he didn’t even do that matching correctly, and then booked me into jail.

I called an attorney that Friday evening, who got me out on bail, for which I had to post a bond, and the city’s lab checked the pill for barbiturates Saturday, finding none, and the case was dropped in court the next Monday.

I then had the attorney sue the City, mainly because nobody would reimburse me for the bail bond. The attorney got an offer from the City of $1250. Since he was going to take 50% of that (contingency now limited to 33-1/3% in CA.US, I believe, by the State Bar (?) ), I wouldn’t accept that amount. I found out then, that he was going to run for City Council and wasn’t happy about being in the position of suing the City, but he then came back with an offer of $2500, which I accepted, getting only half of that.

Ray (I guess the moral of the story is: If any women drivers give you static, push 'em back in their cars and drive off. (Hey, but don’t bounce their bichons frises off other cars; that irritates the town’s dog owners.))

Ouch, what a rotten experience, Nano.

Probably because Dilantin is an antiepileptic drug :slight_smile: Ever read One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest? Paints a rather nasty portrait of the drug. I’m not sure why they’d give it to you for nasal irritation unless it has some uses I’m not aware of.

Coincidentally, Dilantin is quite similar to barbituates in chemical structure.