A friend of my wife and me is, with a certain level of success, fighting a prescription drug dependency problem. I don’t have all the details, but here’s what I know:
For several years, she was receiving Fioricet from a distributor who took her orders over the phone. Even after she stopped taking the pills, she was apparently still getting them in the mail.* Now, she is getting phone calls from the distributor, soliciting further orders. She reports that she informs the callers that she is no longer taking the medication, has not asked her physician for a valid prescription renewal, and to please stop offering to sell her these pills.
And yet the calls continue. It’s reaching harassment levels by now. Personally, I think there may be illegal activity going on.
Whom should she be calling to [del]rat these guys out[/del] ask to look into this? She lives in Orange County, CA, if it’s important.
Thanks in advance for any responses. If any further information is required, I’ll endeavor to obtain it.
Possibly through FedEx or UPS, though. That’s one of the details I don’t have.
I would think a complaint to the FDA would be in order.
ETA: Make that the DEA instead. They would have direct jurisdiction over Class III pharmaceuticals.
I doubt any of that will help, as they’re most likely foreign pharmacies and her name has probably been circulated onto the sucker list of every pill-pushing sleazebag spammer in the world. The assholes calling her now may not even be related in any way to whoever she was filling scripts from before. These are not reputable people, and the calls will likely never end until she changes her phone number.
And if she was using a credit card, she’d better monitor those statements with a magnifying glass or better yet, get a new card number issued.
Evil (but not THAT evil) telemarketer checking in. By the same law that gave us the National Do Not Call Registry she and that company have “an existing business relationship,” which means they can continue to make sales calls to her for four years after her last purchase. By the same law she can ask that they put her on their own DNC list, but they have 90 days to speed that through their system until the salesbots have to stop calling.
You guys thought that law would protect you from the likes of me–Bwa-ha-ha-ha! Fools! No, really, my company promises to put you on the list in 30 days, but that’s a bit of CYA because we try to put you on it by the next day if not sooner. I know it works because, if an assistant gets sick of me calling Joe Blow, with a word she can not only block me from calling him but also everyone else at her firm, including Sally Schmoe, who didn’t had the time yesterday but claimed to be very interested and asked that I call her back to finish the process. I turn into yet another man who didn’t follow through on what he told her he would do and Sally goes lesbian or becomes a nun or something, alas! 
Now, speaking as a telemarketer who has had his own problems with substance abuse, which is partly why he is a telemarketer, what I think might have happened is that her prescription was on auto-refill, explaining why it kept coming after she stopped taking it, and that the marketing calls are continuing because they are assholes who are milking that 90 days (or four years) for all it’s worth. And as a person who was once in her shoes I know how hard it can be to keep dates and time periods straight, so help her work out how long this has been going on and document it the best you can before going to the authorities.