Story is that a friend’s cousin (really!) got pulled over for a traffic violation, and in the course of the violation, his car got searched and they found his mother’s prescription in a bag in the car. Whatever it was (I didn’t catch the name) is not something people take to get high, but is a schedule 5 drug, so they arrested the guy.
The thing is, the guy had all the reason in the world to have the drug on him - he’s a primary caregiver for his aging mother and lives with her. He does on occasion pick up her prescriptions from the drugstore, and preps her many daily pills every day. His story is that this is a drug that the mother no longer needed to be taken, the guy had removed it from her daily pill stash, and had no idea it was in his car (he’s thinking he was going to take it somewhere for safe disposal or something and forgot he had it?)
The family have no reason to suspect him of doing anything nefarious with the drugs (there have been no missing pills, for example). He does have a history of pot use, they’re thinking that’s why his car got searched.
Still, something doesn’t quite smell right about this one. Would the cops arrest someone for something like this? I pick up drugs for my Dad, for example, all the time, sometimes quite potent opiode painkillers. Do I have to worry or get a doctor’s notice or something? The pharmacy has no problems handing them over to me. Now I’m paranoid!
Not legal advice, of course, but as I understand it under federal law (the CSA) the “legitimate prescription” defense extends to members of the household (and household-owned animals). I guess the question would whether that applied under the relevant state law, either in the statute or by case law.
I guess, from the cop’s perspective - is this a situation where mama has a different last name from junior? Which might make the “It’s my mother’s” defence sound iffy. Plus - how old are we talking? I’d be more included to believe the caregiver excuse for a woman in her 70’s or 80’s but if the son is a teen or early twenties -again, sounds odd to the cop. Was it a full bottle, or why is junior carrying around a half-finished bottle of mama’s medication in the car, not leaving it at her house?
Then of course there’s the only half-sarcastic question about his skin colour…
The real question is not whether he gets arrested, but whether they keep on charging him and it goes to trial - ie.e does nobody use common sense.
Technically, if someone else’s Schedule V drugs are in your possession, and you don’t have the prescription, they can and may arrest you. But picking up someone’s prescriptions is rather different from I don’t know how they got in my car/they belong to my mother and she doesn’t need them any more/I forgot I was going to dispose of them safely. Was he actually on his way to the pharmacy to drop them off for disposal?
Assuming that weed is illegal in his state, and/or the cop thought he was driving while high, then I can see how it might have played out.
He gets pulled over for a traffic violation, either he smelled like weed or they ran his record and found previous busts for pot, they asked for permission to search his vehicle, he said Go ahead because he was confident there wasn’t any weed in his car, and they found these Schedule V drugs.
I wasn’t there, and IANAL, but maybe the judge will buy the “I was going to get rid of them, but forgot” story.
A quick google indicates that it’s probably down to state law, and there’s quite a bit of variation, but it may well be technically illegal.
As Shodan suggests, it probably falls into the category of things that may be technically illegal, but where if you have a bona fide reason to be in possession (picking them up for a sick relative) you aren’t usually going to be in any trouble. But if the police police are targeting you either fairly or unfairly for other reasons, they can arrest you on these grounds.
Still, it would be good to know exactly what you technically have to do to ensure that picking up and transporting someone else’s prescription is not violating any statute, and I can’t find clear answers to that.
Same last names. Mom is in her 80s, son is in his early 30s. Both lily-white.
The family believes the son and really just wants this to go away. He wasn’t driving while high as far as I know. Weird that the drugs were in his car, but at the same time, nobody really thinks it’s a problem as they’ve had a whole lotta worse stuff in the house (like… liquid morphine at one point) and nothing’s ever gone missing and there’s no reason to believe he’s doing anything wrong.
Personally I guess I should start carrying around copies of prescriptions if I’m picking up painkillers or similar. Such a weird thing, it would have never occurred to me that this could be an issue.
Don’t know about legal technicalities, but from my cousin, a cop, and another friend also a cop: they are unlikely to make an arrest for this if the container of medication is sealed/unopened. Also, having a receipt showing they were purchased today helps. An actual copy of the prescription helps greatly, but they don’t expect that – mostly that is all done electronically today.
Also, about the “legitimate prescription” defense: if the doctor has told her not to take this medication anymore, that no longer applies.
Frankly, this story sounds a bit fishy (why was he stopped in the first place), but you might be able to persuade a prosecutor to not pursue the charges. Much will depend on the arrestee: legitimate citizen, with a job? No (recent) drug convictions? Etc.
I’m wondering if “they found his mother’s prescription in a bag in the car”, mean “they found a bag of pills in the car”. It seems to me, what’s really going to get the cop looking at things more carefully is pills not in a prescription bottle. If the correct pills are in the correct bottle, it seems a phone call or two would clear up the entire matter. The cop could call the person who’s name is on the bottle and confirm that he was allowed to have the pills [for whatever legit reason]. However, pills not in a bottle, not owned by the person in possession of them is always going to be an issue.
The label on the prescription bottle should be more than enough. I can’t think of anything on the written script that would help more than what’s on the label.
The thing about having a copy of the prescription is that for any tightly-controlled substance, making a copy of the prescription can itself arouse suspicion. I take a Schedule II drug (methylphenidate/Ritalin) and I am never, ever allowed to retain a copy of the prescription. The pharmacist takes it and asking for a copy would likely set off alarm bells, as it could be part of an effort to get the same prescription filled twice. I could take a photo of the script with my phone prior to filling it, but, depending on the audience, producing that photo could be damning rather than exculpatory.
Similarly, if I lost my paper prescription before I could fill it, asking for a duplicate could raise a red flag with my physician. Altering legit prescriptions to increase quantity, dosage or even to change the prescribed drug is totally a thing that sketchy people do.
I don’t think “having a copy of the prescription” helps much not only for this reason, but also because the documentation on the bottle is essentially the same information but in a format that’s harder to use for nefarious purposes. The info on the label is easily verified through the relevant pharmacy. [Edit: ninja’d on this point by Joey P.]
Similarly, the opened/unopened thing seems unpersuasive. Most prescriptions get filled via loose pills; my methylphenidate script (and all other Schedule II stimulants I’ve been prescribed) has always been filled this way. So there’s no way to tell whether the bottle has been opened or not. I guess you could count pills, but at that point you also need to verify that the pills you’re counting are the ones described on the label. (And prescription-bottle labels include that info, or have on my recent prescriptions med bottles).
Some people have weird ideas about medications, even those who should know better. I once had a board-certified internist tell me she’d never write a prescription for naltrexone because “it’s Schedule II and has a high potential for abuse.” Neither of those things is even remotely true; she was grossly misinformed and perhaps a little unsophisticated about addiction medicine in general.
Similarly, the arresting officer may have had a “drugs are bad, mmmkay?” worldview and thus reacted unreasonably to finding a bottle of prescription meds with someone else’s name on it. There are a million other possible explanations, and we can’t really sort through them without more information (as many others have said).
I have a hard time believing that any state would criminalize the actions as described by the OP, but I agree with many others that we’re probably missing some important facts about those actions. (N.B.:my take on the legal details shouldn’t carry much weight—I’m neither a lawyer nor a LEO).
However, I’d love to know more about what is and isn’t legal in these situations. As my mom ages, I’m caring for her more and more. It’s pretty plausible that I might end up picking a prescription for opiates on her behalf, and I’d like to know whether I’m opening myself up to arrest if I get pulled over on the way back from the pharmacy.
(For a number of reasons, an arrest itself would be terrible for me even if the charges were dropped immediately).
Without knowing all the details, none of us can really give an accurate answer. Something else to consider is if the prescription was several months old. I used to keep a couple of days worth of meds in my locker at work. I did this in case I had to stay at work during an emergency. I would just use an old prescription bottle to keep them in and would rotate them every few months… I rotated the pills, but not the bottles. One day one of the bottles fell out and rolled under the bench without me realizing it. Mind you, I work with police officers and we all share the same locker room. One of the officers found the bottle, saw my name and brought me the bottle. He also mentioned that the bottle and label was a year old. He mentioned that if he saw that on a traffic stop, there would be a whole lot of questions being asked as to why I had old prescriptions in my car. (I now rotate the bottles as often as the pills).
Extrapolating from my own experience, imagine an officer finding an old prescription bottle in a car with someone else’s name on it. Combine that with it being a Schedule V drug, which can contain a limited amount of narcotic and I can see where an officer would be suspicious.
Wow, I am still using some pill bottles I got in the 70s. They were sample bottles, and they are very small and have a simple screw-top, not the complicated child-proof ones.
I’m not especially worried about being caught with them, because I use them to carry pills that are legal to buy without a prescription, but I think it’s weird to rotate pill bottles for your “travel stash” or “emergency office stash”, or whatever.
Hmm, and I am still using some opiate drugs (codeine cough syrup) that was prescribed to me more than 10 years ago. I mean, I still have it because I rarely use it, but it’s nice to have cough syrup in the house, and the stuff keeps forever. (When they stopped dissolving it in alcohol, I started mixing it 50/50 with whisky when the bottle is down to half-full, to reduce the growth of pathogens. Yeah, this isn’t the first bottle I’ve kept for more than 10 years.)
Unless he was on active parole or probation, the search wouldn’t be automatic. He’d have to consent or have a probable cause reason (like the bottle was visible) or the police were dirty. This story is a great example of why one should never, ever consent to a police search during an adversarial encounter like a traffic stop. Even things done in good faith like OP describes can catch a case. I just a couple weeks ago found a lighter under the seat of a car I bought in November. The interior was beautifully detailed when I bought it but they missed a bright blue Bic. Who knows what else could be under there?
Transporting controlled pills in anything other that the originally dispensed, label-intact bottle can be enough to get put in the back of a cage car. Even if they’re otherwise legally possessed and legitimately prescribed. Grandpa should keep his 7 day pill reminder dealie at home.
There has to be more to this story. Even something potentially incendiary like OxyContin shouldn’t warrant an arrest, unless the person bragged that they were going to sell them downtown (and believe me, some people are that stupid!).
as for finding things in cars, I bought a used car and about a week after I started driving it, I went ahead and gave it a bath. Since it was new, I was thorough. Even though the car was only 1 year old and had been detailed by the lot that sold it to me. I found the previous owner’s (I assume it was the owner) drivers license under the spare tire. Even better than finding the home address of the previous owner in another used car I had purchased. He hadn’t cleared the onboard navigation system. Not only “home” address, but a dozen frequently visited locations in New Jersey.
Neither example is as sad as looking inside cars at a big auto auction lot. Some of them are repos and about the last thing that is done is cleaning the car before sale. Inside one car was a carseat and children’s toys. Clearly the repo guy just hooked it up one night and off it went. The experienced care buyer I was with says he sees that all the time.
So drugs-legal and illegal I am sure happen all the time.
I never see the prescription script these days; haven’t for years. The doctor (or veterinary) asks me (or asked my mother) what pharmacy I wanted to use; they then call it in directly to the pharmacy.
– come to think of it, I think once I needed a written scrip specifically because something was controlled, though I don’t remember what it was. That was also some years ago, though.
So if you borrow a family members car and they have a half empty bottle of schedule IV drugs in it with their name on it you can be arrested for that? That’s insane.
I get three pages of printed prescription crap from the pharmacy every time I pick up a refill, for one non schedule blood pressure pill. Absolutely no abuse potential, or street value. I asked the pharmacy if it was all necessary, every time, they said yes. Required by the corporation, at the insistence of their corporate legal department. The law does not require it. Every vial is labeled as well, with three numbers, and the pharmacy and my name, and doctor’s name.
Given the absence of information about the traffic stop it’s hard to hazard a guess as to whether the seizure was an attempt to justify a potentially unwarranted search complaint, if the officer realized he didn’t have reasonable cause. I avoided a driving on a suspended license arrest because my father’s truck only LOOKED like it absolutely could not be legal to drive. In fact it was entirely legal. Two cops had joined us, and talked things over. (I was a bit worried.)
Turns out he couldn’t bust me for the suspended license, because the stop was illegal. I cleared the ticket and got the license reinstated the next day. (the ticket was an automatic one from a toll booth camera.) That sort of thing might have played a part in the decision to search being covered by a lame ass complaint. Not to bust “your friend” but to prevent a lawsuit for an illegal search.
This has changed recently-ish. My understanding is that around 2012 the DEA decided it was OK with electronically transmitted prescriptions for some Schedule II drugs. But state laws have lagged a bit, so electronic transmission isn’t universal. My prescription for ADD meds had to be written a year ago when I filled it in Wisconsin. Now that I’m in Oregon, it gets sent electronically and I never see the printed/signed prescription.
And while people often say “call it in” when the patient isn’t handed a written prescription, these days electronic transmission is more likely than a literal phone call. And for scheduled drugs especially, that makes sense—it leaves a clearer audit trail than a hand-written or phoned-in prescription does.