Local pharmacies refuse to fill teen’s autism prescription
Teen’s mom drives 4 hours to fill prescription
As a child, Keara was diagnosed with a rare form of autism. At 16, she no longer suffers seizures, and her symptoms are under control.
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“She’s able to talk and walk. And she’s going to public school,” Keara’s mother, Kimber Townsend, said. “It’s just wrong. People need their medicine.”
Townsend attributes part of this turnaround to medication. Keara has been taking a drug called Focalin since she was 4 years old.
It treats her attention deficit disorder, and Townsend said she’ll need to take it for the rest of her life.
The problem is, Focalin is a Class 2 narcotic, the kind pharmacists said are being restricted.
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“Off the medication, she becomes excessively out of control, incapable of controlling her behavior. She becomes a danger to herself. It’s just not safe,” Townsend said.
Keara sees a specialist at All Children’s Hospital in St. Petersburg, who gave her the prescription. It’s a drive Townsend now takes often because her local pharmacies, which had filled the Focalin for more than a decade, suddenly refused.
“CVS pushes it back to me and tells me flat out, ‘I will not fill this,'” Townsend said. “They have no response other than, ‘I’m sorry. You have to take it somewhere else.'”
The someplace else is the pharmacy at Children’s Hospital, which is a 230-mile, four-hour round-trip from their home in Ocala.
“It costs a lot of money to have a child like this, and then have a prescription that’s not worth the paper it’s written on? It’s unheard of. Doctors have no power today,” Townsend said.
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The fact the prescription is from St. Petersburg could be seen as a red flag to pharmacists.
Last month, an Orlando pharmacist said the DEA warned him not to dispense narcotics that weren’t prescribed locally. The DEA denies that.
The only thing that matters to Townsend is making sure her daughter gets the medication she needs.
“If Keara was off this medication, she’d have to go to a residential facility,” Townsend said.
Filed under: General Problems
I posted my own comments on the article directly pretty much how ridiculous that they would not fill a valid prescription and they knew it was valid as they had been filling it for the past 10 yrs. I also challenged the pharmacist{s} to respond to explain why they they won’t fill it. and felt they were violating the childs ADA rights. Not that anything I said will get anywhere, but at least my opinion made publicly directly in the FL paper. I hope the mother files an ADA compliant and CVS gets a big ADA fine on this.
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