Imagine paying $150 (give or take) at the pharmacy for a refill of oxycontin, which you need quite badly due to the cancer growing aggressively in your body and doing all sorts of terrible, unbearably painful things. On the walk back to the car, you notice that said prescription somehow weighs several times more than even the largest prescription you can imagine—like a good-sized bottle of soda—as opposed to the more-usual few ounces. Opening the bag, you discover the reason: instead of a brown, translucent bottle with a child-proof cap, you’ve been supplied with a smallish cylindrical safe. Your oxycontin is everything-proof, even you-proof. Bummer.
The pill safe comes with instructions, of course. There’s a keypad for a code and the thing will release its life-enabling cargo with the correct combination. But only the amount you’ve been prescribed to take during that 24 hour period. With its cargo parceled out, the tiny pill-safe now resets and starts counting down until the next physician-approved dose. This is an actual idea (dubbed “Med Vault”) suggested by a group of engineering students at Brigham Young University: prescription via a little safe with a timer on it.
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Via BYU
Painkiller addiction is a real problem, of course, hence unlikely-to-pass legislation currently under consideration to make some medications harder to get (requiring doctor visits for refills, for example). In 2008, almost 15,000 people died in the U.S. as the result of painkiller overdoses, most of those pills coming from “friends or relatives” with prescriptions, according to the CDC. Interestingly, Utah, BYU’s home state, has the third highest overdose rate in the country, while being somewhere in the middle in terms of overall prescriptions.
Other suggestions for fixing the abuse problem are cracking down on so-called pill mills—loosely defined as “rogue pain clinics” by the CDC—as well as monitoring patient prescription usage for abuse and busting patients alleged to be “doctor shopping,” increasing access to substance abuse treatment, and restricting pain patients to one doctor/one pharmacy. These ideas range from common sense to kind of fucked (restricting patients to one pharmacy/doctor, for example). But nothing comes close to mandating patients get their pills in a safe.
A Mashable post notes the following:
One concern that could arise out of this sort of electronic prescription drug bottle is the consequence if it malfunctions in a dire situation (for example, you need a pill in an emergency circumstance or you accidentally drop your pill down the sink). But that’s why [BYU student Madison] Clark says the focus for this product is on drugs like painkillers, and not life-critical medication.
So, you probably won’t die if you lose your pill. You’ll just have to haul on down to the pharmacy in excruciating pain and make a plea to the pharmacist, who, one supposes, would be left to make the call. Hopefully you don’t look like an addict, whatever looking like an addict is to that particular pharmacist. Or you can just deal without having your pill until the safe’s timer says it’s cool again. Otherwise, addict or probably not, you can just deal with it, on top of that already pretty special stigma that comes with filling a prescription for something regularly abused.
Soon enough, you might as well be a junkie. Everyone thinks you’re one anyhow.
Reach this writer at michaelb@motherboard.tv.
