‘One Pound of Mofeen’: Is the Old Pharmacist Story Real? Published Sept. 19, 2009
Rating: Legend
It’s a made-up story…
The amount of confused euros ITT is hilarious. Yeah, the states is very backwards. Paper prescriptions, paper checks, paper social benefits cards. What most people don’t realize, like in the meme, just because a pharmacy gets a prescription doesn’t mean they don’t call into the docs office to confirm the script. These are rituals from a bygone era that should have been long replaced by computers and near instantaneous communication.
Central EU, I get my prescriptions on paper. They also send them digitally to some system so I can simply walk into a pharmacy and pick up my stuff using me e-ID.
Also central EU. Some of my prescriptions are transferred socially via my health insurance card. Others are still on paper. Even if I get them from the same doctor during the same appointment, they might be mixed.
I haven’t yet figured out the logic for which prescriptions are digital and which require paper.
There was a time when all you needed to call in a prescription in Denmark, was the doctors authorization number… Which was publicly available. Sure if you called in a prescription at a pharmacy across the country or sounded suspicious, the pharmacy would make a call back, but other than that all you had to do was pick a doctor in an area with lots of other doctors and near a large pharmacy, and you’d get whatever you liked.
It must have been so for +10 years before a journalist and a doctor blew it up, by having the journalist phone in prescriptions for morphine, barbiturates, and other recreationally applicable substances. I don’t know if a doctor can still phone in prescriptions, but the immediate stop gap was to only accept prescriptions accompanied by the doctor’s personal, and crucially private, SSN.
Most prescriptions aren’t on paper anymore though. I have heard that Japan (a very tech savvy country) is actually worse than us with checks and faxes and certain other low/old tech solutions. Not sure if that is true but either way I don’t think the US is unique in this stuff.
Yeah, occasionally, we’ll request a paper one if we think we’ll need to fill it at a random pharmacy, like when we’re on vacation or it’s for something that’s likely out of stock.
Most US pharmacies seem to have problems transferring a script between locations, even within the same company.
Hmm, I recently had to deal with switching pharmacies (in the US) mid-prescription and I didn’t really have any trouble. Went from CVS to a family owned shop.
It’s not all the time… But, for example, last week, my wife had one sent to a CVS, apparently 10 minutes after they had closed. They didn’t fill the script, but they did bill the insurance and were unable to transfer the script to a location that was open later.
About six months ago, I tried to transfer my script from our local target to another target nearby that actually had the item in stock. They said they’d transfer it. I drove over. They didn’t have it. They tried to call the originating target CVS but they wouldn’t pick up the phone.
Between the two, we decided to look into a mom and pop shop (of which there are precious few around us) the one close enough to make sense told us that our doctor was too far away. They were about a 20 minute drive back to there we used to live and we liked them. They were a #$%^ Johns Hopkins practice.
Walgreens f’d me over once because they couldn’t scan my license. I had just renewed it for realID so my plastic license had expired. I had the paper DMV your license is valid and will come in the mail, use this paper in conjunction with your existing license until your new license arrives. I was trying to pick up a non-narcotic muscle relaxer because I fucked up my back.
I really really really hate pharmacies anymore. I should probably just order my shit online.
I think this was changed in Washington. I’m not sure if you can still write physical paper opioid scripts.
Sometimes, if you’re lucky and some generous company has deemed you worthy of a measure of healthcare, your pharmacist (or the person working the register) will make some face or comment when they see you’re prescribed something they have opinions on (e.g. ADHD meds, anti-depressants, I’m sure many other things.)
Sometimes if I’m feeling lazy, I get the Doctors move the prescription to a pharmacy closer to my house. Rather than going into town.
Here are Americans with their paper flimsies. But you manage to have electronic voting.
Nothin’ mo fine than a pound of mofine.
to go
Yea you’re going nowhere after a pound of morphine, I tell you hwhat.
You are. You’re going to SPACE.
Ah, yes. The one place that hasn’t been corrupted by capitalism
I usually just take a gallon of PCP
I didn’t even know it came in liquid form!
¯\_(ツ)_/¯ science
So do you do a lot of PCP?
'got a gallon!
A gallon is quite a bit.
It’s not that you can’t go, it’s just wherever you happen to be suddenly becomes the most comfortable surface you’ve ever laid on.
Oh? You won’t be dining in with us this evening?
It’s still hard for me to believe that this is how pharmaceuticals are secured.
Pharmacist: “Should we dispense this potentially dangerous drug, it’s a large quantity?”
Other Pharmacist: “Of course, look at the paper, it has the correct letterhead!”
It’s basically like doctors sit around with a stack full of signed blank checks in their offices, and every once in a while someone steals one and makes a huge withdrawal.
It used to be fairly normal, the pharmasists knew the various doctors in the area, and they also know what is a reasonable prescription. If there was any doubt, they’d contact the doctor before dispensing the drugs. I had the ‘interesting’ experience of having to go to multiple pharmacies, filling part of the total prescription at each, when I tried to fill a largeish morphine prescription for a family member. There’d been some sort of issue at the main supplier, and none of the induvidual pharmacies had much stock left. It was resolved a few dats later fortunately.
Things are a lot more digital now-a-days, which hopefully makes fraud less of an issue, and definitely makes getting medicines easier.
They also used specific medical names for things and scribbled them horribly so they’d be hard to read if you didn’t know what you were looking for.
It used to be fairly normal, the pharmasists knew the various doctors in the area, and they also know what is a reasonable prescription.
That just seems like a system that is broken by design. If the pharmacists know what a reasonable prescription is, then why bother with the prescription pad at all? Just have the patient ask the pharmacist for whatever it was the doctor recommended.
I suppose what probably happened was that initially the prescription pad was just any random scrap of paper and the doctor wrote down the prescription so that the patient didn’t have to remember the exact details. But, then drugs started getting more powerful, and people started abusing them, so what used to simply be a note to help the patient remember became a secured way to authorize the pharmacy to dispense something.
If the system had needed security right from the start, it probably would have been a system where the doctor sent a prescription directly to the pharmacy via a courier, a phone call, a telegram, or something.
You’re probably not far off in how the presciption pad evolved, but pharmasists, at least here, have extensive training, and some can actually write prescriptions for certain medications. The system has evolved over a very long time, and security is definitely one of those things that’s had to evolve with those changes.
If you start thinking about it, most security and well being norms are just protected by people that believe in the social norm behaving correctly.
Why can’t you go behind the counter, enter the kitchen and pee in a McDonald’s hamburguer? Not due to some law of nature or magic force field, but because the workers (or security guard) won’t let you. Why won’t they let you? Due to a systematic belief system on the entity “McDonald’s”, their job, what’s right and wrong, etc.
But they could simply let you. A banker could let you take a few $100 bills. The consequences are almost entirely based on social rules.
Why can’t you go behind the counter, enter the kitchen and pee in a McDonald’s hamburguer?
You can, at least once. But if you wanted to do it regularly, it’d be easiest to just apply for a job there.
Sure, but those are cases where someone with the job and authority to stop someone from breaking the rules and is choosing not to. Prescription pads are just these wildly insecure things where once the pad is stolen (which is relatively easy to do), it seems like the system is designed to just blindly trust them. I know that has changed a bit in the modern world, but even that it was once like that seems weird.
Well, all it takes for you to drive a metric ton of metal at 120 KM/h in public is somebody signing a document claiming you know how to drive.
The only thing preventing you from creating poisonous gases from two cheap supermarket cleaning products is your own desire.
Sure, but if I want to get a driver’s license, I can’t just walk up to the DMV with a document on the right letterhead and get a license. There’s actually a whole process involving a test.
The fact that a pharmacy requires a prescription on a certain kind of pad from a doctor means that that’s supposed to be a security measure. It’s supposed to stop someone from getting a prescription that they just scribbled on a random piece of paper they found. But, in terms of security, it’s just about the weakest form of security I can imagine.
It’s basically the equivalent of this:
I can’t just walk up to the DMV with a document on the right letterhead and get a license. There’s actually a whole process involving a test.
In theory. In practice, an employee could skip all steps and pretend you concluded the test.
Similarly, a pharmacy expects that you went through a long process with a doctor diagnosing and ordering the medicine.
In theory. In practice, an employee could skip all steps and pretend you concluded the test.
Yes, they could break the rules.
Similarly, a pharmacy expects that you went through a long process with a doctor diagnosing and ordering the medicine.
While following the rules, they could just accept whatever you wrote onto the paper.
See the difference? In one case the security model is reasonable so that it takes an employee cheating / breaking the rules for a bad result. In the other case the security model sucks so an undesirable outcome is possible even if all the security checks are followed.
There are quite a few special requirements that need to be met for narcotics to be dispensed. Can they be ignored? Yup! Also, there should be some numbers run first and in many states an online check is required as well.
the other typo makes it really hard to figure out whether “mophine” should have a [sic] on it…
His pad was stollen, baked into a traditional German Christmas cake.
How does that system work, what is his pad?
Here it seems to be entirely digital, I don’t need anything and just walk into a pharmacy and tell them my name to pick it up, they usually ask for address to confirm but I think it’s just any 2 bits of personal info.
In the US, many states require controls (narcotics) be written on paper prescriptions. If they do allow digital prescriptions of controls, there’s often a lot more hassle involved with getting approved to do it.
Because a letterhead on an odd sized piece of paper is so much harder to fake than a login over an encrypted connection
According to the snopes article that someone else linked in this thread, mofine is spelled incorrectly on purpose. This is a make believe story with overt racist undertones; the “r” sound in morphine has been dropped to imply that the rx thief is a black person.
wow that’s worse than i thought.
not if you’re a native english speaker from the usa, it’s pretty cut and dry that she typed an extra L
Well it wasn’t signed with doctors handwriting pgp, so it was sus
£1 of morphine won’t last very long in this economy.
Just hit up Teresa May’s husband, he’s good for illicit drugs.
Plastic surgeon, RX pad, script, Mofine… I guess Mofine is the new guy they sent to collect at the pharmacy. Italian surname by the looks of it. RX relates to a racecar of sorts, not surprising since surgeons are said to be wealthy. Not sure about the script part though : do pharmacists typically double as programmers ? or is it like, a movie script ? in which case it might just all be cinema. There’s more to this message that we understand right now. Keep digging, Mofine. We’ll get 'em
RX as opposed to TX. Receiver and transmitter in radio communications
Thanks !! the fog of war is slowly clearing
If true, this is incredible.
True or not, I would argue.
If it’s fun to pretend, then I’m fine pretending.
He framed a phone call?
I’m guessing, the RX Pad can be used to print a prescription on a piece of paper?
Probably a facsimile of the prescription from the fax machine
Like some kind of advanced iPad?
Unless the thief has real good insurance, they better have brought their life savings to the pharmacy with them.
100 pills of 30 mg morphine each cost 36 $, that’s 3 g. So 1 g is 12 $.
One pound is around 450 g. So it’s about 5000 $ total.
A decent amount of money, but if you resell it on black market you can make a big profit.
Gotta spend money to make money!
United Health Care’s response to this prescription:
“Nah, we ain’t paying that. We’ve determined the fair and reasonable rate is a stick to bite down on; don’t be a pussy.”
Damn I get mad when one of my prescriptions costs more than C$20
Thief: “Whers MA daM MOPHINE!”
Do you need a straw with that?
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