I’ve been hanging out in a hospital a lot lately and passing by the pharmacy each day, and it occurred to me that there must be a huge turnover of painkillers through there on a regular basis. Now I’m curious how those large quantities of drugs get there in the first place.
Presumably drug companies don’t just put big boxes of Vicodin and Fentanyl in the mail. Are they shipped to pharmacies by armored car? Is there a special unmarked, heavily armed “drug truck”? I’ve never heard of such a vehicle being robbed. Or do they count on the UPS guy not realizing what a gold mine he’s sitting on?
What about non-controlled drugs? Does something like, say, Ampicillin or Synthroid just get sent refrigerated via FedEx?
CVS sends them the controlled substances with their regular deliveries. Everything going to CVS stores goes through their distribution centers and is packaged in totes. The totes for the pharmacies are tagged as such and have a tamper seal so they know if they’d been opened.
They use regular trailers and box trucks. If someone wanted to they could hold up those trucks but they’d have a hell of a time digging through a hundred totes of make up and Cheetos trying to find the pharmacy totes. The home office tracks their trucks movement so a stopped truck could send up a flag.
Not sure how the larger quantities going into the distributing centers are handled.
I think for the most part the pharmacy industry can count on criminals being the morons they actually are and not the masterminds portrayed in film. While they may lose something occasionally any losses are going to be investigated, investigations are good at finding the weak links.
Our private pharmacist dispenses controlled substances and it is shipped either by fedx or UPS. No special shipping. Just a typical brown shipping box delivered to the office which the front desk person signs for.
Not quite what you’re looking for, but at the hospitals where I’ve worked (all of them pretty big with close to one thousand beds), there is distribution of narcotics from the central pharmacy to the hospital wards and units. The solution is low tech - basically there was (and is still) a wagon loaded to the brim with morphine, oxycodone, hydromorphone (Dilaudid), . . . , which is wheeled in sequence to the wards, dropping off drugs at each stop. As far as I know and can tell, the schedule is random. Even with that element of unpredictability, I have often thought this is a heist waiting to occur.
Do you have any idea how much narcotic is used on a cancer ward? Or on a surgical floor? It would make quite a haul to hit the wagon early in its route.
At the pharmacy I work at, there are two ways that we get controlled substances. The first is via the “Truck” which is the truck from the corporate distribution center. We get most of our daily drugs from there, and it comes in the same delivery as the rest of the store’s merchandise. However, we only recieve CIII-CV drugs from there. The really good stuff, the CII (Oxycodone, Hydromorphone, Adderall, etc) come from one of two sources, even from the wholesaler (McKesson in our case), or from our secondary distributer (Anda in our case).
Mckesson delievers to us (and other companies) daily Monday through Friday. This is when we need drugs ASAP, or for CII’s. The deliveries are made by Currier, and depending on the area, even in an unmarked van, or sometime even in their personal car.
Anda ships all their stuff to us via FedEx in a non-marked box with tamper evident tape.
Whenever we get a controlled substance delivery, the pharmacist checks off what was received against the invoice of what should have been received.