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Drug paranoia ranting
Oct. 6th, 2006 07:19 pmA recent post by ![[livejournal.com profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/external/lj-userinfo.gif)
herooftheage reminded me that I'd been meaning to vent about this.
Of late, it has gotten harder and harder for me to treat my allergies. My best over-the-counter medication (Dimetapp) was... removed from production, due to a stupid FDA scare (a rant for another day). What I rely on mostly these days is Sudafed.
A few years back, some enterprising recreational chemist discovered that you could convert large quantities of Sudafed into some sort of fun illegal drug. More scare-mongering followed.
First, the big pharmacies started restricting the amount you could buy at once. I used to go to the pharmacy rarely, and buy a 3-6 month supply. Not any more, now the most I can buy at once is 48 doses. Then they decided to remove it from their main shelves, and required you to go to the Pharmacist to get some. It still (technically) doesn't require a prescription, mind you, you just need to ask the workers in the pharamcist section to get it for you.
A few days back, I went to the local Walgreens to get some miscellaneous stuff, and figured I'd get some more Sudafed while I was there. These days, I need to get it much more often, after all. They wanted to see my driver's license. Not just *see* my license, but enter a bunch of data from it into their central computer, apparently to ensure that I wasn't buying "suspicious" amounts of my allergy meds. I might have objected, but the clerk was already well nto the data entry by the time I realized what he was doing, and I'm not as huge a privacy-wonk as some. But of course, for such a system to *work*, it has to call home to a centralized database -- and something went wrong with that process. It just stuck at "waiting for data" for over ten minutes. Eventually, I said to forget the Sudafed, and bought my other stuff. They had to actually reboot the cash register to get it out of its "waiting" state.
I decided to go down the street a few blocks to the Codman Square Pharmacy.kestrell and I used to shop there, years ago, and were very unhappy with their general level of competence. Filling prescriptions took inordinately long, assuming there wasn't some fatal glitch with the paperwork that stopped them from being filled at all. When the local Walgreens opened, we shifted custom to them immediately. But, mirabile visu, this small, non-chain pharmacy still has Sudafed available right there on the shelf, where any mortal can buy it. Guess who's getting all of my allergy med business for the forseeable future...
herooftheage reminded me that I'd been meaning to vent about this.Of late, it has gotten harder and harder for me to treat my allergies. My best over-the-counter medication (Dimetapp) was... removed from production, due to a stupid FDA scare (a rant for another day). What I rely on mostly these days is Sudafed.
A few years back, some enterprising recreational chemist discovered that you could convert large quantities of Sudafed into some sort of fun illegal drug. More scare-mongering followed.
First, the big pharmacies started restricting the amount you could buy at once. I used to go to the pharmacy rarely, and buy a 3-6 month supply. Not any more, now the most I can buy at once is 48 doses. Then they decided to remove it from their main shelves, and required you to go to the Pharmacist to get some. It still (technically) doesn't require a prescription, mind you, you just need to ask the workers in the pharamcist section to get it for you.
A few days back, I went to the local Walgreens to get some miscellaneous stuff, and figured I'd get some more Sudafed while I was there. These days, I need to get it much more often, after all. They wanted to see my driver's license. Not just *see* my license, but enter a bunch of data from it into their central computer, apparently to ensure that I wasn't buying "suspicious" amounts of my allergy meds. I might have objected, but the clerk was already well nto the data entry by the time I realized what he was doing, and I'm not as huge a privacy-wonk as some. But of course, for such a system to *work*, it has to call home to a centralized database -- and something went wrong with that process. It just stuck at "waiting for data" for over ten minutes. Eventually, I said to forget the Sudafed, and bought my other stuff. They had to actually reboot the cash register to get it out of its "waiting" state.
I decided to go down the street a few blocks to the Codman Square Pharmacy.
kestrell and I used to shop there, years ago, and were very unhappy with their general level of competence. Filling prescriptions took inordinately long, assuming there wasn't some fatal glitch with the paperwork that stopped them from being filled at all. When the local Walgreens opened, we shifted custom to them immediately. But, mirabile visu, this small, non-chain pharmacy still has Sudafed available right there on the shelf, where any mortal can buy it. Guess who's getting all of my allergy med business for the forseeable future...
