Walgreens & CVS, what's going on with pharmacies?

And I was trying to do my links better and I still messed it up, and now I can’t edit. Sorry.

I’m glad someone is holding the doctors accountable. They pass out the opiates like candy and then wonder why people get addicted or abuse those drugs.

@Adirondackwannabe Agreed, they did say they are not going after all doctors, mostly walk-in clinic doctors who aren’t making sure there’s real pain there before prescribing.

My niece’s addicted mother (not related to me) even pulled her own teeth or broke them to get pain meds, ugh. She’s on her second or third time in jail now due to fraud and thievery.

On Walgreen’s it is just some kind of broken pricing system, I’m sure, but it is a little ‘iffy’ since it’s happened in other states as well.

Prescription pain medication is the fastest growing drug of abuse in this country. It has overtaken many “hard drugs”. In fact, since people think they are prescriptions, they are somehow safer, and they end up overdosing, especially when mixing with alcohol, over the counter cold medications, etc.
Many states now have controlled medication monitoring programs that doctors can access. I frequently access that site to see how many addictive medications were prescribed to patients I see, when their last refill was, if they get medications from a lot of different doctors or pharmacies.
Addiction is tough to beat because it requires the victims brain until societal mores do not matter, friends and family do not matter, not even what the consequences will look like tomorrow. Only the fix for right now matters. As such, I’ve seen patients use fake ids to get narcotics, pretend they just broke a fracture that they purposefully did not allow to set. I’ve seen one patient forge test results to show he had an aortic aneurysm to get narcotics.

@drhat77 Oh yeah, preaching to the choir here, it’s horrible. Even my mom is having trouble getting clean again after her Stage4 cancer went into remission, her docs are taking her of dilaudid, and it’s tough for her.

autocorrect changed “rewires” to “requires”, sorry

Rite Aid was fined for selling expired products
Wal Mart was fined for overcharging

There’s nothing new about this. I remember seeing a cartoon in the olden days, when I was a child, showing a merchant with his thumb on the scale while weighing a customer’s vegetables.

Yeah, but cracking down on doctors who overprescribe pain meds is a huge deal here, it’s a money-making industry and CVS supplies the meds, which is why I find it odd.

In my state, it’s against the law for the register price to not match the shelf price.

So, in this state, Walgreen’s has a company policy where they refund the total item price to the customer if it doesn’t match (in other words the item is then free).

As for CVS, I think it’s a good company policy. It shows they care for their customers overall well-being. I see nothing wrong with having a medical ethics policy at a pharmacy.

@SpatzieLover Pharmacies don’t know all the patient info like doctors do, so how would they even gauge the usage appropriately?

The pharmacies don’t need to know patient info, they have scientific studies to work off from. There are protocols to be followed for specific pain killers. Many doctors don’t follow those protocols.

United States opioid death rate stats
(if Fluther would allow a photo add, I’d just have inserted the visual on this page, here)

@SpatzieLover It seems like a no-win cycle though. If the drugs make you addicted in a short period of time, then how is a person supposed to control it if they’re on them long-term? People get addicted to coffee, exercising, etc…but those generally don’t cause death if you od. So cutting off scripts for people with real pain is not really a viable solution because they’ll need something. What is the solution?

@KNOWITALL Have you noticed the surge in heroin use? One of the reasons cited is addicts getting cutoff from prescription drugs.

@Adirondackwannabe

I’m curious how you know there’s a surge in heroin use? Not suggesting you’re involved with heroin in any way shape or form, but still wondering how you’d know about that?

@FutureMemory I read 4 to 5 newspapers a day. Yeah dinosaur. But it’s widespread across all of our area of the state. Most drug busts used to be marijuana and cocaine. Now heroin is popping up all the time. I have friends in the Sheriff’s Department, they tell me the same thing. Our Sheriff has also had news articles about the amount of heroin they are finding. It might be different in your area. Here it’s booming.

@Adirondackwannabe Hmmmm, what are the signs of heroin use, aren’t they the ones that fall asleep with needles in their arms and stuff? Nasty.

@KNOWITALL Not up on the addicts signs. I’m just going by the amount and number of times it shows up in drug busts.

Yeah @KNOWITALL they call it “on the nod” I believe, that falling asleep thing. A friend of mine was getting a tattoo by a well known heroin addict (but also world class tattoo artist) when suddenly he said “Whoa bro, feeling kind of tired” then he passed out, still holding the tattoo gun. When I lived in NYC I used to see people once in awhile that were also nodding off in public. They’d be standing in place, say on the sidewalk in front of their house, drooling, while bending over like they were going to throw up, then standing up straight again for 5 seconds, then bending over…a real mess.

@Adirondackwannabe I forgot about such things being reported on in newspapers…duh. Do you live in NY state?

My ex husbands cousin was addicted to heroin.
He went from being a chubby, funny, sweetheart of a 15 yr old to a skeletal looking 15 year old with no personality and a really bad attitude in about 4 months.
It was so hard to watch.
I was one of the few people that he would even communicate with, but my ex got pissed because he felt like it was done of my business and told me to butt out. So yeah, whatever. I really hope he’s doing better these days.

@FutureMemory I live in Upstate NY. The newspapers around here still do a police blotter. It lets us keep track of our friends and neighbors.