‘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.
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.)
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.
I think this was changed in Washington. I’m not sure if you can still write physical paper opioid scripts.
Sometimes if I’m feeling lazy, I get the Doctors move the prescription to a pharmacy closer to my house. Rather than going into town.
Here are Americans with their paper flimsies. But you manage to have electronic voting.
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.
If you start thinking about it, most security and well being norms are just protected by people that believe in the social norm behaving correctly.
Why can’t you go behind the counter, enter the kitchen and pee in a McDonald’s hamburguer? Not due to some law of nature or magic force field, but because the workers (or security guard) won’t let you. Why won’t they let you? Due to a systematic belief system on the entity “McDonald’s”, their job, what’s right and wrong, etc.
But they could simply let you. A banker could let you take a few $100 bills. The consequences are almost entirely based on social rules.
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.
There are quite a few special requirements that need to be met for narcotics to be dispensed. Can they be ignored? Yup! Also, there should be some numbers run first and in many states an online check is required as well.
Plastic surgeon, RX pad, script, Mofine… I guess Mofine is the new guy they sent to collect at the pharmacy. Italian surname by the looks of it. RX relates to a racecar of sorts, not surprising since surgeons are said to be wealthy. Not sure about the script part though : do pharmacists typically double as programmers ? or is it like, a movie script ? in which case it might just all be cinema. There’s more to this message that we understand right now. Keep digging, Mofine. We’ll get 'em
RX as opposed to TX. Receiver and transmitter in radio communications
Thanks !! the fog of war is slowly clearing
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?
£1 of morphine won’t last very long in this economy.
Just hit up Teresa May’s husband, he’s good for illicit drugs.
to go
Yea you’re going nowhere after a pound of morphine, I tell you hwhat.
You are. You’re going to SPACE.
Ah, yes. The one place that hasn’t been corrupted by capitalism
I usually just take a gallon of PCP
I didn’t even know it came in liquid form!
¯\_(ツ)_/¯ science
So do you do a lot of PCP?
'got a gallon!
A gallon is quite a bit.
It’s not that you can’t go, it’s just wherever you happen to be suddenly becomes the most comfortable surface you’ve ever laid on.
Oh? You won’t be dining in with us this evening?
Unless the thief has real good insurance, they better have brought their life savings to the pharmacy with them.
United Health Care’s response to this prescription:
“Nah, we ain’t paying that. We’ve determined the fair and reasonable rate is a stick to bite down on; don’t be a pussy.”
100 pills of 30 mg morphine each cost 36 $, that’s 3 g. So 1 g is 12 $.
One pound is around 450 g. So it’s about 5000 $ total.
A decent amount of money, but if you resell it on black market you can make a big profit.
Gotta spend money to make money!
Damn I get mad when one of my prescriptions costs more than C$20
the other typo makes it really hard to figure out whether “mophine” should have a [sic] on it…
According to the snopes article that someone else linked in this thread, mofine is spelled incorrectly on purpose. This is a make believe story with overt racist undertones; the “r” sound in morphine has been dropped to imply that the rx thief is a black person.
not if you’re a native english speaker from the usa, it’s pretty cut and dry that she typed an extra L
His pad was stollen, baked into a traditional German Christmas cake.
How does that system work, what is his pad?
Here it seems to be entirely digital, I don’t need anything and just walk into a pharmacy and tell them my name to pick it up, they usually ask for address to confirm but I think it’s just any 2 bits of personal info.
In the US, many states require controls (narcotics) be written on paper prescriptions. If they do allow digital prescriptions of controls, there’s often a lot more hassle involved with getting approved to do it.
Because a letterhead on an odd sized piece of paper is so much harder to fake than a login over an encrypted connection
Well it wasn’t signed with doctors handwriting pgp, so it was sus
If true, this is incredible.
True or not, I would argue.
If it’s fun to pretend, then I’m fine pretending.
Thief: “Whers MA daM MOPHINE!”
Do you need a straw with that?
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