You may want to consider ibogaine treatment as well. There is ample documentation about its effectiveness in interrupting narcotic addiction without withdrawal symptoms within a matter of hours. Americans are unfortunate because it’s not legal in the US; however if you’re in Canada you’re in luck because there’s a very good treatment center there. There are actually centers all over the world, of varying quality. It can be a bit pricey though. If you like, feel free to email me with inquiries about the nature of the treatment, and where you can seek it legally (outside the US only). I’m not a provider nor affiliated with one, but I do know quite a bit about this subject.
Getting off of opiates is hard.
Staying off of them is much harder, for many folks.
One must share one’s experience, strength, and hope if one is to remain sober.
I’m going to have to throw the bullshit flag on tihs one…
You think he did, in fact, die from the withdrawal?
I’ll take a wild guess and say the doubt was over some nature of the detox, not the actual death of the alleged poster.
Sometimes pharmacists also talk to each other.
I don’t know what it would be like in a large city, but in the small town I grew up in, the pharmacies were always borrowing things from each other – say a patient came in for an ointment that you’d just run out of. The pharmacist told a trusty tech (that would be me) to call around and see if anyone else had some. If so, I’d zip over there to pick it up, and make the customer happy. When the order came in restocking us, I’d return it.
Information got passed back and forth in the same way. If someone seemed to be getting too many control prescriptions, or pushing the envelope a little, the pharmacists would call back and forth to see if the patient was pharmacy-hopping. I’m sure some stuff still got through, but there were a fair amount of people that got very gentle “I’m sorry. You just filled a prescription for this last week at XXX down the road” answers.
Small town pharmacists also tend to know, to a certain extent, what’s going on in their patient’s lives. If you’ve heard from an upset customer earlier in the week that Auntie Greta’s cancer has progressed and they’ve called hospice, you’re unlikely to wonder why Auntie Greta’s husband is bringing in a morphine scrip for her. I’m sure this helps sort the sheep from the goats.
We had a guy come in and buy a bottle, go out, and come back in five minutes later with the empty, cracked bottle. He said that he dropped it in the parking lot. The pharmacist asked why then, there was no syrup on the bag he was carrying it in. “Oh,” said he. “Whoops.” and slunk away, no doubt to another pharmacy where he perfected the routine.
Sorry, I meant to say “but not life threatening”. I was in a hurry. I love how you guys have everything I say under a microscope around here. ha.
I’m going to take a wilder guess and say that since he actually BOLDED the “deadly” part, he was just cracking a joke.
Good thread. I come from a family of pharmacists, and like others have said, they’re just not pill dispensers doing a doctor’s bidding.
Also, don’t you people who take a lot of these opiates get the crazy dreams?
I had knee surgery once, and was prescribed Oxycodone. I was taking it with beers which was nice. I kept a pretty nice buzz going for a couple days, but then the DREAMS started.
I had the freakiest, craziest, scariest, mind altering dreams. I still get chills thinking about them and that was years ago. I was still in an incredible amount of pain, but I said “fuck this” and just started hitting the aspirin. It didn’t help, but at least the dreams went away. Also, a little marijuana was better than any of it. What a drug.
Anyone know if what he just described would run afoul of HIPAA?
From the DHS HIPAA FAQ Site:
That’s the best I could find right now, as long as the patient is filling prescriptions at both pharmacies then my interpretation would be that they are both entitled to that information.
Hmmm. And I suppose the pharmacist could lawfully find that his patient fills scrips at both pharmacies by… consulting insurance information?
When I worked in a pharmacy (1999-2002) we used to get faxes from other pharmacies saying “so-and-so is a drug seeker - don’t fill”. I don’t think that’s ok anymore but one pharmacist could still call another to ask if they have filled for a patient, and then ask for the fill information. Believe it or not, there is a considerable amount of discretion allowed to providers:
I also wanted to note that the pharmacist can also legally call the insurance company and/or the doctor. At my current place of employment (a Medicaid HMO) we will often put a patient on a contract so that we will only pay for prescriptions written by a certain dr or filled by a certain pharmacy, or both. However, if a patient is smart and paying cash (since generic Vicodin is one of the cheapest drugs you can get) then the only way to find that out is to call other pharmacies.
I’ve been off hydrocodone for over 5 years now, after being addicted for 3 years (8-10 pills a day). When I first started taking them, they made me drowsy. After awhile I had the experience you had. I couldn’t wake up in the morning without my pill. They made me a whirlwind at work and at home. You CAN do it! It’s only been a short time for you. I’m a much better Mom now than I was then. Even though at the time I tried to convince myself otherwise. Keep with it, it gets better every day. Send me an email if you ever need to talk.
Sorry for the hijack.
He is a she, but not offended.
I didn’t think about HIPAA, not being in the medical industry anymore and having it in front of me all the time. To protect the reputations of the pharmacists I worked with, the stuff I speak of did occur in the dark ages before HIPAA.
Patients should NEVER be arrested if there is evidence their diagnoses. Even is the patient gets addicted!! pharmaceutical companies should pay for the best rehabs, because its the pharmaceutical companies fault … Especially if the patient started taking the drug in the mid nineties because pharmaceutical companies swore the drugs were safe and not addicting
That’s about when this thread was started.
It is totally our business! We are allowed to refuse to fill any prescription, for any reason, not just narcotics. This has gotten people in big trouble when they did that with birth control, which is a discussion for another day, but pharmacists have lost their licenses for filling prescriptions they shouldn’t have.
I did fill a few forged prescriptions in my day - everyone eventually does - but it was one that I didn’t recognize as a forgery, and I certainly wasn’t in cahoots with him or the doctor.
We can usually tell by who the patient is, their profile, and who wrote the prescription whether it’s legitimate. There’s a pain clinic in this city that is legitimate, and we know that if we see one from them, the patient needs it. For one thing, they also use lots of non-narcotic therapy so we know they’re for real. But “pill mills” are a huge problem in many areas.
I had a classmate who died from ODing on stolen drugs. 
Looking back, I wonder if he became a pharmacist so he could get his hands on drugs; IDK. Sure hope not, and there are definitely easier ways to get them.
There are a few exceptions to that - methadone, ORLAAM, and Suboxone are the main ones that come to mind - but they have to be from approved physicians. You can’t just go to your friendly neighborhood doctor and get these. Well, actually, any doctor who can write for narcotics can write for methadone, but only for pain control.
As for addiction, people who use these drugs legitimately rarely become addicted. Dependent? Yes.
And what’s the difference?
If you are addicted to drugs, your quality of life goes down. If you are dependent on drugs, your quality of life goes up. 