Unacceptable. Why make legitimate, law-abiding consumers of prescribed medications go several miles across town, or even to another town, to buy them instead of to the CVS down the street?
I believe one tactic used by many pharmacies today is that, unless they know you, they won’t tell you over the phone whether they have any of these drugs in stock. This prevents the would-be robber from canvassing the stores in an area to get an idea of what’s in stock. At times, this can be a little inconvenient for the patient, but not nearly so much as the above suggestion would make it.
Generally speaking, an opiate addict who gets his/her fix is a well-behaved addict…
A certain percentage of people seem to become addicted to something, so I’m not sure that making drugs harder to get reduces addiction.
Maybe we treat addiction like a physical problem and provide the drugs legally?
Thinking out loud on those.
Anyway, if not legalization, then put in some of the protections that exist in banks and some quick-e-marts. Put the pharmacy behind bulletproof glass, for example. Guards. A buzzer to the police. Red dye that spoils the pills.
Agree. My pharmacy has to factor in my med usage when they order, since they know I have a prescription for X number of pills every month.
My insurance mail-order pharmacy routinely fucks up basic prescriptions, and literally has a 100% rate of “lost” or under-filled prescriptions for my Relpax (an expensive migraine drug that I needed prior authorization for. They lose the prior authorization routinely, too).
I wouldn’t trust them to get me opiates on a routine basis.
We used to do smash and grab in the 60’s, actually I was too little to smash and grab but I’d tag along til my big brother kicked my ass hard enuff I’d leave. A buddy from High School would work at the store, learn where all the good stuff was kept, steal the keys to the cabinet, pass the info and the keys to my bro and his friends who would throw cinder blocks through the front window, sprint to the back, steal all the redbirds and yellow jackets and black mollies and pharmaceutical coke and dilaudin and be gone before the cop around the corner could fart in the front seat of his black and white (they really were black and white those days).
The big problem these days are the Docs who operate medicaid mills, prescribing oxy to medicaid eligible junkies who go to the Doc’s pharmacy next door for their Government money fix. Need to cut out the middle man and just buy them their drugs straight from the Treasury, save a lot of paperwork and we’d have enuff room in the prisons for all the senators and NFL stars who belong there.
Yeah basically I am saying cheaper is better. Basically I think there must be a happy medium in price where some drugs were still expensive enough to need a simple job to buy but never so much that supply would be in doubt. I have reasons to feel a threatened drug supply actually increases drug intake when it is available - ala the hungry man who eats more at one sitting if he knows the food supply is in doubt. The figuring is that even a junkie will feel its easier flipping burgers to pay for the weekend meth binge than dangerous smash and grabs (or make those that do so much the rarer)?
At least as far as marijuana goes, those countries who have legalised it have not seen wild surges in the amount of stuff getting smoked. Per that, I’d be willing to get behind a program where in baby steps currently illegal drugs (in Aus, YMMV per country) like lsd, salvia divinorum, magic mushrooms, mdma etc could be legalised under strict sale requirements due to much more accurate and unbiased research being done on the now not illegal for study drugs. The public would benefit from this knowledge as it slowly adapted it into gosh, I don’t know, a culture of personal responsibility! I know a lot less alcoholics in my day than I am sure to have in previous eras because people largely know better the damage that abuse causes to the heart, liver and kidney etc. I am not convinced in my area that junkies today in addition to modern alcoholics would have the same number as just the heavy drinkers in days gone past, and I think that fact is thanks to knowledge. Education about the drug ‘boogerman’ is a good thing.
I am a pharmacist. I have been present for two pharmacy robberies (more than that if you count those who say they’ll “pay up front with their non-pharmacy items” and walk out without paying): One as an intern, one as the pharmacist on record.
Pharmacies are doing quite a bit to keep this from happening. In addition to the GPS bottles that some pharmacies use, some use time-locked safes for their Schedule II drugs (ie it takes 5-10 minutes from “unlocking” to the safe actually opening), and in pharmacies which get hit on a regular basis, sometimes an off duty police officer is payed to be a visible presence. Even with all of that, robberies keep happening, and probably will so long as drugs of abuse continue to be sold. Comes with the territory, I’m afraid. That doesn’t mean we can’t keep innovating new ways to lessen the chances of it happening, but I don’t think we’ll ever stop it altogether.
You’ll reduce the number of robberies, sure, but in addition to introducing access problems for patients who are “legitimate” (I hate that term, btw), you’ll probably set things up so that attempts are more likely to result in violence/death.
While I’ll grant you that crystal meth is often cited in this way, it’s interesting to note that a pharmaceutical grade methamphetamine product actually exists as a Schedule II drug (same as Adderall, Ritalin, Vyvanse, etc) under the brand name Desoxyn. So Delta-9-Tetrahydrocannabinol exists as a Schedule III drug in the form of Marinol and Schedule I when derived from Marijuana, and Methamphetamine exists as a Schedule II drug as Desoxyn, and Schedule I in Crystal Meth.
Given the abject failure of prohibition, ethyl alcohol is probably here to stay, but it would serve as a terrible benchmark for legalization, IMO.
I absolutely have a dog in this fight, so I won’t even try for unbiased here. Terrible idea. First, if only certain drugs are required to be sent by mail but the rest can be filled at your local pharmacy, you introduce a chance that a significant drug interaction will slip by, putting patients at risk for, among many other things, Serotonin Syndrome, QT prolongation (sometimes results in a heart rhythm abnormality called Torsades de Pointes), Respiratory Depression, up to and including the fatal version, etc. Second, if all of your medications are filled mail order, except for acute scenario meds, in addition to missing potentially important drug interactions, you also don’t have a local pharmacist who knows you (assuming you stick to one pharmacy), can spot an issue before it gets into your hands, talk to you and/or your doctor about the issue, and potentially resolve it quickly, since I suspect your average mail order pharmacist isn’t calling and asking questions of patients like we local pharmacists do, and is instead relying solely on the doctor’s word or on the patient to call them with questions.
Usually, yes, but that tends to be a very temporary phenomenon because we humans tend to be very error prone and eventually even an “addict” on a well-controlled dose is going to slip up somewhere, which can lead to them no longer being very well-behaved.
Oh, I’m fairly certain that at the least, a large number of people in the USA meet the diagnosis of a Caffeine Use Disorder. I don’t have any cites to back me up, though, so grain of salt, I guess.
Long-term, sure a reduction probably reduces addiction. Short-term, without a social support net to catch those who happened to be unlucky enough to develop a Substance Use Disorder around the transition period? I’d opine that it probably increases risky behaviors to acquire the drug(s) of choice.
We already do this for Opioids, be it with Methadone maintenance or Suboxone. Treating the addiction with more of the same type of drug which caused the addiction, unfortunately tends to be a bit problematic, though, for quite a few reasons.
Oh, pulease!:rolleyes: Mail carriers already deliver all sorts of valuables, including opiates from mail order pharmacies. It would only be an increase not a new thing.
Won’t stop a robbery. Generally speaking, most robberies don’t even involve the soon-to-be-if-not-already felon crossing the pharmacy counter. Most of them threaten to use force and back it up with an actual firearm or what looks like a firearm, but rare is it, in my experience, both direct, and indirect from reports of robberies in other pharmacies nearby, for the individual(s) robbing the pharmacy to grab the drugs themselves.
