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?
A gallon is quite a bit.
'got a gallon!
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?
the other typo makes it really hard to figure out whether “mophine” should have a [sic] on it…
His pad was stollen, baked into a traditional German Christmas cake.
Well it wasn’t signed with doctors handwriting pgp, so it was sus
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.
wow that’s worse than i thought.
not if you’re a native english speaker from the usa, it’s pretty cut and dry that she typed an extra L
If true, this is incredible.
True or not, I would argue.
If it’s fun to pretend, then I’m fine pretending.
‘One Pound of Mofeen’: Is the Old Pharmacist Story Real? Published Sept. 19, 2009
Rating: Legend
It’s a made-up story…
Thief: “Whers MA daM MOPHINE!”
£1 of morphine won’t last very long in this economy.
Unless the thief has real good insurance, they better have brought their life savings to the pharmacy with them.
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!
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.”
Damn I get mad when one of my prescriptions costs more than C$20
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.
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.
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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.
Sure, but those are cases where someone with the job and authority to stop someone from breaking the rules and is choosing not to. Prescription pads are just these wildly insecure things where once the pad is stolen (which is relatively easy to do), it seems like the system is designed to just blindly trust them. I know that has changed a bit in the modern world, but even that it was once like that seems weird.
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Sure, but if I want to get a driver’s license, I can’t just walk up to the DMV with a document on the right letterhead and get a license. There’s actually a whole process involving a test.
The fact that a pharmacy requires a prescription on a certain kind of pad from a doctor means that that’s supposed to be a security measure. It’s supposed to stop someone from getting a prescription that they just scribbled on a random piece of paper they found. But, in terms of security, it’s just about the weakest form of security I can imagine.
It’s basically the equivalent of this:
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In theory. In practice, an employee could skip all steps and pretend you concluded the test.
Yes, they could break the rules.
Similarly, a pharmacy expects that you went through a long process with a doctor diagnosing and ordering the medicine.
While following the rules, they could just accept whatever you wrote onto the paper.
See the difference? In one case the security model is reasonable so that it takes an employee cheating / breaking the rules for a bad result. In the other case the security model sucks so an undesirable outcome is possible even if all the security checks are followed.
It used to be fairly normal, the pharmasists knew the various doctors in the area, and they also know what is a reasonable prescription. If there was any doubt, they’d contact the doctor before dispensing the drugs. I had the ‘interesting’ experience of having to go to multiple pharmacies, filling part of the total prescription at each, when I tried to fill a largeish morphine prescription for a family member. There’d been some sort of issue at the main supplier, and none of the induvidual pharmacies had much stock left. It was resolved a few dats later fortunately.
Things are a lot more digital now-a-days, which hopefully makes fraud less of an issue, and definitely makes getting medicines easier.
It used to be fairly normal, the pharmasists knew the various doctors in the area, and they also know what is a reasonable prescription.
That just seems like a system that is broken by design. If the pharmacists know what a reasonable prescription is, then why bother with the prescription pad at all? Just have the patient ask the pharmacist for whatever it was the doctor recommended.
I suppose what probably happened was that initially the prescription pad was just any random scrap of paper and the doctor wrote down the prescription so that the patient didn’t have to remember the exact details. But, then drugs started getting more powerful, and people started abusing them, so what used to simply be a note to help the patient remember became a secured way to authorize the pharmacy to dispense something.
If the system had needed security right from the start, it probably would have been a system where the doctor sent a prescription directly to the pharmacy via a courier, a phone call, a telegram, or something.
You’re probably not far off in how the presciption pad evolved, but pharmasists, at least here, have extensive training, and some can actually write prescriptions for certain medications. The system has evolved over a very long time, and security is definitely one of those things that’s had to evolve with those changes.
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?
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
Nothin’ mo fine than a pound of mofine.
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