Last year a couple of geniuses tried to rob a pharmacy in a nearby community. According to the security cam video (which friends of mine have seen) one of them got out of the car and watched out while the other one drove to the edge of the parking lot, aimed at the pharmacy’s front door, and floored it. The impact didn’t breach the door, but it did manage to send the driver’s face into the windshield, because this young scholar neglected to put on his seat belt before his ramming maneuver.
Providence protects idiots, so the guy was addled for a few seconds but recovered quickly. He backed the car up and made another run at the door, which didn’t give way completely but opened enough for one of them to get inside. Unfortunately, it also sent him once again face-first into the shattered windshield, because even after his previous misadventure he still didn’t put on his seat belt.
It’s a testament to the humanity of his partner-in-crime that he passed up the chance at a wide-open pharmacy and drove his now-unconscious buddy to the hospital.
And…my Google ads are for oxycodone and vicodin. :smack:
I’ve got a chronic pain issue from nerve damage in my foot due to multiple surgeries in the same small area. I take a regular dose of oxycodone (plus gabapentin) to calm it down, and it works like a charm for me. I’ve taken the same (quite small by pain management standards) amount for the four years I’ve been treated by the pain specialist, but I’m also insanely careful about not taking more than the absolute minimum to maintain the pain at a tolerable level – the only time I can recall being completely pain-free in the last five years was when they had me on morphine for a few days after a knee replacement last year.
So it really pisses me off that people abuse a medication like this, and rob pharmacies and injure or kill completely innocent people, all to get high off something that makes a huge difference in my quality of life. I’m in nice, polite suburbia, and as far as I know the pharmacies around here are all robbery-free, but they still often don’t carry my medication; sometimes I have to check 2 or 3 in my area to find one that has it. I’m sure it’s for safety reasons.
I’m sorry your friends/coworkers are being robbed like that, ladyfoxfyre. It’s a lousy situation all the way around.
If they’re actually treating pain, they may well just be a “pain clinic”. I don’t know how common those are elsewhere, but around here narcotic abuse is so rampant that most of our chronic pain treatment is provided by dedicated clinics.
I haven’t written for a long-acting narcotic (including methadone) in the three years I’ve been in private practice. Around here if you write one script for oxycontin, you have ten people in your office the next day with beat-up folders of medical records, essentially normal MRIs, and sob stories about how they got kicked out of all the pain clinics. (It gets out through the pharmacies.) It’s really that ridiculous. I get one or two patients a day like that anyway.
That’s one of the reasons why I’m getting out of private practice and getting back into academics. It’s just exhausting.
Marketing. The manufacturers were recently fined hundreds of millions of bux for inappropriate, misleading, incorrect advertising. I think criminal prosecutions are being considered also.
Resident/student training in a community hospital (the same one I work in now). We have a satellite FP residency program from the state school (my alma mater). I’ve been working with them for a while as a volunteer, and they asked me to come on as full-time faculty.
If it’s such a perfect town, then they don’t need police, fire, or medical services, either. Think of all the money that could be saved. Heck, they probably don’t need sewer or sanitation services.
Pharmacies in my area have been getting hit, too. I don’t think mine is a likely target because its in a busy grocery store in the middle of a busy shopping center, but you never know.
I’m a technician, and get daily phone calls asking if we have Oxycodone 30 mg in stock, the blue ones, not the white. (That part confuses me. It’s the same medication, different manufacturer, thus the difference in color. Why does it matter?) Last Saturday I got 3 calls in a row within 5 minutes, from 3 different males who I think were together. I didn’t work Sunday but one of the techs told me they got several phone calls that day as well.
It’s crazy shit. Per the pharmacists I work under, the answer is always no, we don’t have them in stock. If we answer yes to one of these callers, within a couple of hours we get flooded with people with scrips for Roxicodone 30 mg, #360 or #240 or some other crazy high number. Those things go for like $15-20 per pill on the street, and we’re located fairly close to some really shitty neighborhoods that are crawling with drug seekers and addicts.
We do have 2 or 3 regular patients who we are familiar with and regularly get prescribed the medication, and we do fill it for them. If we get a new patient with a new prescription, we deal with it on a case by case scenario. It’s at the pharmacist’s discretion whether we fill it or not.
What I’m curious about is the doctors who prescribe this stuff. It’s not like people are bringing us fake prescriptions, they’re legitimate. Why is a 20ish year old kid, who looks perfectly healthy and doesn’t appear to be in any sort of discomfort(and I know not all pain can be detected by looking, but come on ) getting prescribed this shit? Do the docs get kickbacks from the drug companies? Or just get tons of patients when it gets out that Dr Whoever hands the stuff out like candy? (Note I’m not including people who legitimately need the stuff. Please don’t think I’m underestimating what people who live with constant pain deal with.)
Anyways, sorry to hear that, ladyfoxfyre. Hope you(or I) don’t have the same experience your friend did.
No kickbacks from drug companies, that I’m aware of.
Some docs are pill docs, who will prescribe anything for a cash payment, then fake records to document a need. They are few but very popular.
Some docs are easy to con.
Some docs are intimidated by aggressive patients, or just want to please their ‘customers’.
Some docs started out prescribing them for what they thought were legitimate needs, and got sucked deeper and deeper into providing more and more, and just can’t seem to say ‘no more’.
As far as I know, the sites that advertise they are selling hydrocodone/oxycodone are all scams. There are forums here and there discussing online pharmacy web sites and it seems to be pretty widely understood that you cant just send cash and expect to actually get either of those drugs in return.
I don’t know about now, but back in 1999 and 2000 you could. One of my contacts at a local methadone clinic showed me a bunch of Internet pharmacy bottles full of hydrocodone. They were from sites that did “phone consultations” where the doctor would talk to you over the phone and prescribe the drugs, then the affiliated pharmacy would mail them.
I think several states have cracked down on this since then though.
Marketing has a big part in it. SiL was amazed when I was able to get information off her own Pharmacopea (sp?) showing that this drug which the nice medical visitor (aka salesman, in other trades) had convinced her was the next greatest thing for chronic pain has been in the market for years, only under other names and made by other companies. He was pushing a generic as if it was a brand-new thing; a lot of her coworkers bought into it (a pharmacist friend remarked on sales for that particular brand going up).
She’s been taking her “medical visitors” with a hefty chunk of salt since.
My clinic doctor is leaving clinic work because of the pain-in-the-ass nature of the work - his bitch is insurance companies, not addicts, but I’m sure he gets his share of “I pulled my back and have terrible pain.”
Are you me? I could have easily described this as both my daily work experience and my exact thought process. I’ve been noticing crazy high quantities on the stuff lately too, but only in the past year. And yes, the"blue ones". I have heard that the “blue ones” are much easier to crush and abuse.
And yes, I’m getting a shitload of under 25 year olds with scripts for #240, #360, etc. It’s getting really insane.
ETA: And, you live and work in my town. Maybe you are me…
