Raise your hand if you’re pulling all your Rxs from CVS
Okay, friends, so I’m gonna talk about something that directly affects my life and which I’m gonna ask you to take action on if you are capable of doing so:
As of today, CVS is limiting all opioid prescriptions to a 7 day supply. All of them. It doesn’t matter what they’re written for, who they’re written by (a surgeon, a PCP, a pain management professional). Flat-out across the board: 7 days.
Let me make this clear: THIS IS NOT GOING TO MEANINGFULLY ADDRESS ANY KIND OF OPIOID CRISIS IN ANY WAY. The people who are getting opioids illicitly will continue to get them. They are not getting them through legitimate prescriptions.
The ONLY thing this does is to try to make CVS look better because /they/ were not checking prescriptions properly years ago in Florida. Years ago, before all of our current nationwide “safeguards” against opioid abuse – databases that pharmacists can check, prescription limits for primary caregiving physicians, etc. – went into effect. This is part of an ass-saving publicity stunt.
And here’s the thing: while this doesn’t meaningfully address the issues surrounding opioid addiction in any way? (And I’m not even getting into the issues of how we treat addiction like a moral failing in this country, none of what follows is an indictment of addiction or addicts, only an indictment of how those of us who are not addicts are treated poorly due to the stigma of addiction.) This whole thing DOES punish non-addicted, dependent patients with legitimate prescriptions. People like me. It makes it so that I, a patient who has permanent scarring on their spinal cord, cannot get a full month’s supply of my medication from CVS. If I filled my prescriptions at CVS (which, due to their other issues, I’ve already pulled my family’s scrips), I would… what? Have to get another prescription every seven days for the rest of my life? Another doctor trip every seven days? A pile of paperwork and a trip to the pharmacy every seven days? Paying for doctor’s visits every seven days?
What if I didn’t have a husband who had a car and a job that took him out of the house he could drive to pick those up? What if I lived alone, a disabled person without the networks to get to the store repeatedly like that? What would that look like to me?
Pain literally kills people. Not just by suicide – though everyone in the chronic pain community knows at least one person who was denied pain management and took their own life as a result, and usually more than one – but pain LITERALLY ruins your body. A human being cannot be in pain all the time and live. It’s just not possible.
(Hold the ‘have you tried yoga’ and ‘there are other medications.’ For some of us, we have tried literally everything and this is the only option we have. This is the only thing that works for me.)
So tell me again: why do chronic pain patients and cancer patients need to be put through more nonsense in order to make a corporation look a little better?
Friends – especially able-bodied friends – pull your prescriptions from CVS. And if you’re on Twitter? Quote this tweet, and say this is why you are pulling your scrips. Don’t forget that Target pharmacies are CVS pharmacies now.
Go to Walgreen’s. Go to Wegman’s. Go anywhere else. Pull your scrips and tell them that you’re not going to participate in the demonizing of pain patients so CVS can look good.
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