to go
Oh? You won’t be dining in with us this evening?
‘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.
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.
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.)
Thief: “Whers MA daM MOPHINE!”
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.
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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.
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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:
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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.
Do you need a straw with that?
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?
Nothin’ mo fine than a pound of mofine.
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