Originally Posted by halfspeed
Crooked pharmacists. It's not unusual for oxycontin to make it to the streets that way.
I actually work in healthcare as an administrator. What I think is more likely is physicians writing prescriptions for shady reasons, and those prescriptions are then filled by the pharmacy. Sometimes, the pharmacy is also in collusion with the physician or at the very least enables the inappropriate prescribing behavior by the physician. In the 'pill mills' that write scripts for Oxycontin, Demerol, Vicodin, Ritalin and the like, it is usually a cash business with minimal records kept. One reads in the media of these physicians being raided and shut down by law enforcement and/or the state medical licensing board.
Whenever I get a call from one of my pharmacists to report someone trying to pass a forged or altered prescription, the interesting thing is that it is always for a controlled substance such as a narcotic, tranquilizer or ADD drug. No one ever, ever tries to scam us for something like a beta blocker, diuretic or antibiotic. Go figure.