Stupid pharmacy rules

[SinkGirl]

Agh. DH and I both have yet another bastarding cold and we’ve run out of cold medicine.

Went to pharmacy after dropping the twins at nursery, wanted to buy some day nurse (for DH) and some Sudafed (for me - works fine for me without all the extra stuff), one box each would no doubt get us through the next awful few days.

Nope - pseudoephedrine is a controlled substance so he can only sell me one or the other.

If two of you are sick, that’s two days worth of medication each I’ve been able to buy.

How much bloody meth do they think you can cook with two boxes of cold medicine?

I get it - you can’t sell me 100 boxes. But really? Is there no common sense?

This is why people buy things online!

If I needed tons of pseudoephedrine to cook meth, I could trawl all the pharmacies in the area (not so easy when you’re actually sick and with twins in tow) or buy it online. This rule only hurts busy sick people! Sure, it would save the criminal some time if they only had to visit 50 chemists rather than 100, but still!

More a case of stupid government rules as the pharmacist is just following the law - the stores don't get to make the rules otherwise they could exercise their judgement

Sorry, I didn’t mean the pharmacist / pharmacy is to blame - just the stupid rules for pharmacies!

Just hear to take notes about making meth, in case I have a Breaking Bad style life makeover.

But, yes. I seem to spend a fair bit of time internally ranting about pharmacy/prescription irritations at the moment.

Probably because if you took both you could overdose on something. They just follow the rules.

I had a pharmacy try not to sell me Sudafed the other day because they'd seen me breastfeeding and it's not safe when breastfeeding. I knew that. I managed to get through the cold on just paracetamol and hot honey and lemon. However my husband doesn't have to!

In the end I said I'd go elsewhere and they finally agreed to sell me some. I don't think it's strange for the not-ill person to go to the shop for the ill one but they were acting like it never happens

I feel your pain OP.

I caught a really nasty bug when I was on holiday in Sydney once and ended up in bed for 2 days straight. Australian bought Nurofen Cold & Flu (with pseudoephedrine) really helped me. So as I was leaving to go home (to a country which didn't sell Nurofen Cold & Flu), I popped into the chemist at Sydney airport to buy ONE box of Nurofen Cold & Flu to take with me. The pharmacist refused to sell it to me as she insisted that someone had to vouch for my identity. I showed her my passport but that wasn't enough. I had to have a travelling companion vouch for me apparently. But I was travelling alone! So despite my passport, my country's ID card, my UK driving licence, none of this counted and she wouldn't sell me one measly box of Nurofen Cold & Flu. It made no f*ing sense whatsoever. Especially as in Sydney city centre I'd been able to buy it at checkout in their equivalent of Boots. Obviously I must like I'm a meth dealer when I fly or something. Bizarre and very frustrating!

That's interesting because not that long ago I went to the pharmacy to get night nurse. I wanted the capsules and also the liquid for DH. I asked for them explaining why I wanted both but was it ok still for me to do so. The assistant just got the nod from the pharmacist and all was fine.

Pretty sure it was within the last 6 months.

Night nurse has different ingredients so it’s not as restricted. Unfortunately when a pharmacy refuse a sale it’s because of government regulations. We’re not being unreasonable, we just don’t want to lose our jobs or in the pharmacist’s case their licence. Yes, we know there are ways around the restrictions but we didn’t write the legislation.

What used to annoy us when DH was alive was that he had to take 8 paracetamol a day as part of his treatment plan. His gp refused to prescribe it because they have a policy of not prescribing otc meds - perfectly fine, we would not have fulfilled the prescription anyway for a product that costs a few pence. However, the pharmacy would only sell us three boxes at a time, so depending on where I got or, that could be anything between 48 to 90 tablets. This meant we spent a lot of time in and out of pharmacies during the latter stages of his illness when he should have been at home, because the pharmacies refused to sell more without a prescription, and we couldn't get a prescription to prove the need. I can't drive so he had to go himself. It was ridiculous when he was prescribed three months worth of sleeping tablets at a time, 240 morphine tablets a month and as frequent oramorph as needed, so if he wanted to off himself, he had much nicer ways to do it than overdosing on paracetamol. You would think the pharmacy would be able to speak to the GP in those circumstances to confirm that it was ok to sell the quantity.

Probably because if you took both you could overdose on something. They just follow the rules

That’s not why. It’s because pseudoephedrine is a controlled drug, because you can use it to make meth (assuming you can’t get your hands on a big old barrel of methylamine 😂)

You’re not going to make much bloody meth out of a box of day and night nurse and 12 Sudafed though, are you?

I’m not blaming the pharmacist at all, it’s not their fault. The guidelines are beyond frustrating though, especially when you’re ill, your DH is ill, your kids are ill, knowing you’ll have to drag yourself out of your way in a couple of days to get more when you should be quarantined indoors!

Thats awful Gretchen. You’d think your GP could help in that situation.

I find it bonkers you can buy a big box of 400mg ibuprofen (think I got a box of 96 in boots!) but in the local shop you’re limited to 16 x 200mg and you can only buy one box. It’s fine if you’re mobile and working and out near a chemist every day but when you’re not it’s a massive pain in the arse!

Or when you want to buy ibuprofen for you and liquid nurofen for the kids at the same time - I can’t give them the tablets and I’m not paying extortionate amounts of take it in sugary liquid form myself!

*That's interesting because not that long ago I went to the pharmacy to get night nurse. I wanted the capsules and also the liquid for DH. I asked for them explaining why I wanted both but was it ok still for me to do so. The assistant just got the nod from the pharmacist and all was fine.

Pretty sure it was within the last 6 months*

Pretty sure Night Nurse doesn’t contain pseudoephedrine, only the Day Nurse. Think Night Nurse contains the crappy decongestant that’s in the stuff you can buy the corner shop (phenylephramine, something like that). I only know this because I’ve had bouts of sinusitis for years, and pseudoephedrine helps whereas the other stuff doesn’t, hence why I always try to keep sudafed on its own in (but we’ve had so many colds in the last few months we are out of everything)