At my pharmacy we are monitored by DHEC. We are more and more being forced to scrutinize the customers who come in with narcotic scripts whether they are first timers or long term patients with a long history of pain management. We had recently had a fake script come in that later led to the bust of a very sophisticated drug ring that was going on for sometime. The script was found to be fake only after it was filled. My pharmacy is a 24 hour pharmacy so not all prescriptions can be verified at night time which leads to problems with people coming late on Fridays having to wait till Monday to get verified or a doctors office not being opened.The prescription was written for Oxycontin ER 40mg #120 BID and Roxicodone 15mg #240 QID was written for a hospice terminal cancer patient. As normal my pharmacist had notified the customer that he needed to verify the script before it can be filled. The customer complied and waited. My pharmacist had looked the script over nothing was odd about it other than being for #240 but it was understandable since it was for a hospice patient. He looked up the profile of the patient and seen they had have got the medication before and was covered by Medicaid, written by the same doctor. We are require to not call the number on the script but to check our database for the office number, in which he did and both matched. He spoke to the doctor, everything checked out fine with the medication that was being prescribed and for the amount and for the reason. It was soon filled after and sold to the customer. The next morning when the next pharmacist came in for the next shift, the pharmacist from the night who filled the prescription talked to the other about the script he had filled the following night. He did not have a smartphone nor internet access at the time of filling, so they both checked out the practice on google on the pharmacist's phone that was coming in, and nothing could be found of this practice. No office location, no info on the practices name, nothing came up. So the district DHEC officer was called in to investigate. The script that it was written on passed all the test, void holograms, DEA# passed, watermark passed. Later on more information was found out about what was going on. The people behind the operation had found out how to duplicate the security features on the paper and were printing their own scripts with a real doctors DEA#. They somehow managed to be enter in the database with the number that was on the script so it was being verified to a fake office number. The person who answered to verified was well versed and had a good amount of medical knowledge to pass off as the real thing. My pharmacist wasn't fired or fined but got a tongue lashing from our DHEC officer about the script.
This all happened on a Friday night around 9:30 pm. What I find wrong is after everything as a pharmacist is suppose to do to ensure that a script is legit, and it passes those things and it ends up being a fake, how much more could have been done other than driving to the address of the practice itself. And on top of being scolded by the officer for filling a fake script, even tho many scripts for other patients were filled before this one by other pharmacist from the same doctor under the same practice and no one thought to question it then. And that it was being covered by medicaid with no flags being thrown up from it from the Medicaid. I thought that a pharmacist was suppose to put the well being of a patient first, in this case he followed the rules for verifying and thought that a legit hospice patient was being helped. If anything I would have thought that the pharmacist would have been somewhat thanked for helping to catch this ring that was going on and helped put an end to anymore drugs from these people being put on the streets illegally.
So after that indecent, DHEC has came down even harder and are now requiring every pain narcotic, from percocets to roxicodones to be verified regardless of the purpose being prescribed or if the person is a long time patient or new one only excluding RX's from hospitals which are usually only written for less than 20. So we now have to tell our regular customers who have been getting Oxycontin from us every month for the past 3 years from doctors who some of the pharmacists know personally can not get them until they are verified. For those people it can sometimes mess up there regular schedule of taking the medications like what had happened this weekend. A lady who has been getting Oxycontin 15mg every month for the past 2 years from us, came in Friday with her new script to be filled. It was 6 pm when she came in and we told her that we are now required to verify all narcotics with the doctor. Unfortunately for her, the doctors office closed at 5pm and it was Friday and its Memorial weekend so the office won't open till Tuesday for us to verify. So for her, she will be out of pain medication for her chronic pain for 4 days and there is nothing we can do about it. All the pharmacists are afraid to even fill a narcotic now unless it verified even if it is for a well known customer.
I do understand there are some sketchy people that come in with scripts you can tell that are fake or are written for pain medications and you might think they don't really need what is being prescribed to them, I still think the pharmacist should be able to make that decision in the interest of his or her self and for the patient on whether or not to fill the script whether it can be verified at the time or not, and not be worried that they will lose their job from doing so.
