2172 Hydrocodone Acetaminophen-actavis/walgreens Complaint (Page 2)
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I too had my RX medication refilled (again) at Walgreens, but this time (When I did not take my RX Tylenol with it, like I always do) I noticed, that I have been given a different Brand of medication (A Generic Brand/MFG by-ACTAVIS). My "Norco-Hydrocodone/Acetaminophen 5-325/TB" did not work as prescribed or even when I took 3 pills at one time (because 1 nor 2 pills didn't work/relieve my pain). I believe I have been given FAKE NORCO/Hydrocodone pills (white/#2172 on them) from Walgreens Pharmacy. Today I contacted the DEA & FDA via email and requested that they investigate my complaint as soon as possible.

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Re: John H (# 58)
Unfortunately, “Patel” has every right to question any script he has been asked to fill especially if it is past the Doctor’s normal hours and you are unknown to him as a patient. Here is where there is a disconnect: Many pharmacists try to get involved in your treatment plan. The Pharmacist has no medical training to analyze medical information, especially information they do not have any access to. Pharmacists do not know your medical issues, they do not have access to it, and they do not have any right to get involved in you and your Doctors analysis of your medical issues but they do this anyway. Another problem is their attitude. Many of them are mean spirited and rude and the Pharmacy is fine with that. Anytime a Pharmacist can run off a pain pill customer they are applauded by their upper management. If they do not fill your script that means you are one less potential problem for them. Not only do I believe that “Patel” was not fired he probably got an “attaboy” from his Supervisors.

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It is nice to know that Walgreens in Santa Clarita is not a 24 hour pharmacy. I hope the pharmacist Patel got fired for his personal involvement with us who wanted out RX filled. He has no business questioning our rx from the doctors. He was so worried about our business and not minding his. I filed a complaint against him and Walgreens with the FDA. I want to sue him and Walgreens. Bad place to go

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Re: cliff j (# 57)

There is hope for us all. In the meantime it’s so unfair we have to suffer at no fault of our own. We are LEGITIMATE CHRONIC PAIN PATIENTS that have been thrown into this “ring of fire!”

Source: "Pain Task Force Report Is Out – HHS Working to Give It Oxygen". Nationalpainreport.com. Web. June 2nd, 2019.

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Re: cliff j (# 57)

Like you & all of us victimized by this “behind our backs” reformulation trying to fool us all I’m in the same boat w/ my generic PERCOCET. I’ve tried many different manufacturer’s w/ the same outcome...ineffective & after 20yrs in pain mgmt w/ no problems the side effects are horrible from new filler compounds & formulations.

Thank you for this new reality of reduced oxytocin & reduction of active ingredient. I truly thought I was losing my mind!

There are in fact CPP Advocate groups working on our behalf. One great group is the NIH’s NATIONAL PAIN REPORT; Ed Coughlan is leading it. Research it, sign up & share your experiences.

Blessings to all!

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Re: Mark (# 56)
And it will remain legal until some group musters up the integrity to challenge the status quo. I KNOW it would be hard but it would not be impossible. The word impossible says “I’m possible” in its very spelling. Again, this would require some group to get involved because of the expense involved which would be overwhelming for the average person. I have seen a formula for success previously but it took a group taking on this issue that could over come the expense and also has the tenaciousness to see it through. What has been done to chronic pain sufferers is atrocious. It is like clearing the books of a robbery by charging a person who can prove they never committed the offense with the offense. The different groups cannot get the actual criminals so they go after innocent people. It makes it look like they are doing something when what they are doing is twisted and perverse.

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Re: w john (# 55)

Yep! That's exactly what happened and it's all legal!

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Re: w john (# 20)

Here is an update to my case. After appealing every adverse decision I received I finally ran out of options. I cannot afford to pay for the Vicodin 7.5 out of pocket so I am stuck with a generic. Here are the things I learned. Pharmaceutical companies are allowed to LEGALLY only put in 80% of the active ingredient. For example, if you are prescribed a 7.5 mg Vicodin or Norco pill the manufacturer is allowed by law to put in 6.0 of the active ingredient. That is only part of the story. The manufacturers have reduced the oxytocin in a pain pill by 70%. The awful thing about that is in an attempt to make these pills "nonaddictive" the oxytocin was taken out but in removing the oxytocin also removed the effectiveness of the pills rendering them slightly more effective than an over the counter medicine. The legal users of these pain pills have been hit with a double whammy. A reduction in the effective ingredient by 20% AND having 70% of the oxytocin removed. The drug addicts and thieves go on with their life as usual because they use illegal substances and steal from their friends and relatives as usual. The only people being penalized by this so called "opioid crisis" are the legal users of pain medications that need them to sustain any quality of life. Many have been on these legal prescriptions for 10+ years and are having these pain reducers taken from them in an attempt to regulate the heroin users and thieves.

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Re: Mark (# 53)
I do not know how many “opinions” you received from attorney’s. I have been told on different occasions that things were impossible and guess what? They were only impossible to the people that did not want to put in the necessary work. They all want the “lay downs”. The easy cases. They do not want to WORK . I was told many years ago when I thought that a Federal Judge had given someone a “legal sentence” that he was overreaching by sentencing everyone to the 5 year maximum ALLOWED BY STATUTE. I have no desire to relitigate this issue in this forum but the bottom line is this person appealed the LEGAL sentence and got released from prison because of the overreach of this Judge. Every attorney he and his family spoke with said this was a hopeless case and refused to file the proper paperwork so he filed it himself and won. It set precedent law throughout this Country. I do not have the energy to help this case along by getting Law Schools to become involved and use this case as a class project. Of all the things you mentioned you failed to mention that the prescribed amount of an opiate pill can be, for example, 7.5 mg and “Big Pharma” can dispense only 6 mg by law as they are allowed by law to dispense 20% less than they label says. No one knows for sure how much of the effective ingredient is being dispensed. Is it the 7.5 mg it says on the label? Is it 6 mg as allowed by law. You say you bankrupted a hospital? That means you collected whatever insurance money they may have had as the Bankruptcy would have discharged any responsibility the hospital had. It could potentially take every dime you have to bring this action and I know that your belief system would never allow you to take this action. If my friend had listened to all of the opinions he received before he just said I need to approach this from a different angle then he would have served several more months in confinement. He won what many attorneys said was an unwinnable case because he believed that the Federal Judge was not acting properly. I would cite where you could find this case in the Federal Reporter but it would disclose personal information that I do not have the authority to disclose. Laws were made to be changed and over turned because of the overreach involved but I would require tenacious litigation and a lot of money. Most people are not willing to spend the money and most legal firms would not file the case because of all the work involved. Getting a legal firm to take this case on a contingency basis is next to impossible if not impossible. They only want the low hanging fruit. To say that Corporations can do anything they want as long as they tell everyone what they are doing is just not right. It may not be popular but I know it is beatable under the right circumstances. The first step would be to convince a law school to litigate this issue as a class project. They take on the extremely difficult issues from time to time. I have seen the impossible done before and I will not accept a few legal opinions from lazy attorneys who are not willing to take on a fight. Granted, it may be an uphill fight but to say that it is unwinnable because these “Big Pharma Corporations” is telling everyone in advance what they are doing I just do not accept.

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Re: cliff j (# 51)

No pills need any testing. Every PDR Physician Desk Reference shows the reformulation. I can't tell you what year exactly each different medication was reformulated, but if I had every PDR for each of the last 10 years it would show exactly when each medication was reformulated. That's all the evidence anyone would need as to what happened to the effectiveness of said medication.

There is no way anyone can be sued. A lawfirm looked at the whole thing and said basically Big Pharma can make whatever they want as long as the PDR shows it, pharmacists and doctors are made aware of it. This all happened! They also said, pretty much any federal civil court judge would toss the case at summary judgement and that would be that... They said, what they've done is all within the confines of the law. You can bet Big Pharma and the government lawyers spent hundreds of hours looking at this every which way possible for any culpability whatsoever! BTW I closed down a hospital and bankrupted them over what they did to me. If anyone had the money to go after these jackals it would be me! The lawfirm who won my case looked at this for me at several possible angles. To win a case against Big Pharma with government fingerprints all over it would be worth billions, but there is absolutely NO case whatsoever! Where they a pos for doing what they've done to suffering patients YES! Did they do anything that was ILLEGAL? NO! They can make and sell anything they want that doesn't harm or kill you. If you don't like the side effects don't take it! You have the choice not to buy or use it. No one is forcing anyone to take these drugs. Just because the drugs are less effective isn't illegal... If you don't like a product don't buy it, but you can't sue somebody because you don't like what they make or it doesn't work like you'd like it to...

They said, if it made it by summary judgement a very liberal jury might return a Verdict on them, but following the law the judge or appellate court would toss the Verdict and or case... Just because a jury or citizens are outraged by what they've done which is definitely underhanded. They've broken no laws except they are bad people for what they've done to pain patients. You can't win a case just because someone is characterless pos evil human being... If this was the case everyone would be suing everyone for being a bad person.

It was a doctor who told me about the oxytocin because he was upset that my pain was no longer manageable with today's reformulation using pills. He showed me in his PDR what they'd done. I'd have to take a phenomenal amount that could possibly kill me because of the ingredients they are using these days.

My only real option is palliative care. Having a subclavian catheter installed(that's a catheter installed into a subclavian artery off your heart) so I can inj. drugs. There's lots of drawbacks to that. I'd have to surrender my driver's license for good even though it's already a restricted license because of my disabilities, the maintaining of the catheter, more surgeries to replace it from time to time, will definitely shorten my life using those types of drugs. The list of drawbacks is enormous! But my pain would be managed. Not much of a good choice either way.

An infusion pump implant can't be used because it can't be regulated as I need more or less of the drugs as my nerves and spinal cord are irritated by massive amounts of scar tissue. A constant flow the pump provides doesn't fit my pain management requirements.

The only hope in all of this is to get the voting public aware of suicides because of pain not being properly controlled by new reformulated synthetic opiates. Millions of people have little to no quality of life. These are the only 2 things that will stop this from occurring! The voters demanding this be fixed is the only way it will be, but with the current FAKE opioid crisis the MSM pushes and governmental agencies like the DEA, CDC and FDA lying and cooking their books for a FAKE narrative this will continue until the voting public has had enough of their BS and lies! It's the only time anything ever changes when elections are in play... All of a sudden these lying backstabbing politicians get a consensus of reality that they need an angle to get re-elected and this is how this will eventually get fixed. Voters were angry decades ago that people's pain wasn't being properly managed so the politicians greatly lessened restrictions, oxycontin was born, other meds increased in dosage strengths and then boom all the addicts showed up and destroyed it for people like us! Then the voters screamed and the politicians jumped on the bandwagon and condemned the very people 18 years earlier the professed to help...

I've been in this 30 years now and I've watched it all unfold up and down. When I started in this it almost took an act of congress to get a schedule II opiate outside of a hospital in 1989. My doctor said it goes in cycles and that we're on the big downside once again. It goes in 15 to 25 year cycles. The late 70s and through the 80s until about 93-94 was the last big downturn against drugs. Then it relaxed until it got abused really bad until 2009 it started its downturn again... Each time it was the voting public who forced the politicians to change the regulations or lose their jobs and here we are again??...

I'm 60 now and don't have the time to wait for voters to get angry again and swing it the other way once again, so I'll probably get into palliative care and go the IV drug route because I really don't want to spend what few years I have left in bed or screaming out in pain scaring my wife to death because this has effectively destroyed her life and not just mine... It's strange how others never think about family members who have to watch helplessly while pain consumes and destroys the person they love! And the saddest part of all is the government destroying families and thinking they're helping! If a drug addict can't feel high on synthetic opiates they just find something else to abuse! SO WHAT DO LAW ABIDING PAIN PATIENTS DO? SUFFER...

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Re: John H (# 48)
I had changed Pharmacies from Walgreen’s to Walmart because Walgreens’s was serving the Actavis brand of hydrocodone 7.5. I was okay until the head of the Pharmacy department at Walmart went to part time and a new young guy was made the Pharmacy Manager. I brought in a prescription that I had filled there for 12 months and this new guy said he didn’t agree with my Doctor on my treatment plan. I asked him: Are you a Medical Doctor? Have you ever examined me? Do you have my medical records? Of course the answer is NO to every question but he still thought it was okay to supplant his opinion for my Doctors opinion. This person wanted to cut off all of my medication immediately with the exception of my blood pressure and cholesterol medications. I had to complain to Walmart’s management before I finally got this handled. However, this Pharmacist has caused so much grief by his constant harassing phone calls to my Doctors Office questioning everything they did that I am having to change Doctors because the Doctor that had taken care of me for 27 months just got fed up with the constant harassment and has refused to treat me any further. The Doctor said they would write bridge prescriptions until I could find a new Doctor and I have an appointment with a new Doctor soon. This whole situation has gotten out of hand.

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Re: Mark (# 49)

I understand your frustration. When you say "Don't worry you can't sue anybody" what you really mean is that you cannot find anyone to take this case on a contingency basis. You could hire any of a great number of medical malpractice firms so long as you paid them by the hour and had enough money to give them a big retainer up front PLUS filing fees and other fees like deposition charges that could run into the thousands of dollars. Also, you would need to have pain pills from several manufacturers professionally tested and analyzed to prove your case.

My guess is the MONEY to file and bring this case would be more than a normal person could afford to bear. What about a class action suit? Same problem. The class action firms will not take on a case of this nature in the politically aggressive state we are in now. They would probably not take this case on even if it was done on a cash basis because they would have to work and they only want to file the easy cases without the political baggage. I buy into exactly what you post about but without the money to follow through on this everyone is just stuck. If I was independently wealthy I would gladly take this on as a service to everyone that has been aggrieved by this nonsense but I am not.

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Re: Mark (# 49)

Wow. THANK YOU! For last couple years I just knew my generic oxycodone/acetimonophen 10/325 I’ve been taking under strict pain mgmt for 18yrs with not one side effect, able to lead a tolerable existence pain threshold seemingly changed “overnight!” throwing me back to ground zero w/my degenerative disc spine, spinal stenosis...all of it! After 4 failed surgeries & countless failed procedures Opiate Pain Mgmt was given to me as last alternative like a miracle 18 yrs ago!

I just knew there had to have been a drastic pharmacology formulation change! My whole body & mind have suffered a complete 180! I’ve complained, studied, you name it to figure this out.

You r so right; our doses have been cut in half & on top of that the pills have been reformulated to be ineffective & making us sick on purpose! They forget the yrs of research done by Dr’s to originate Opiate Pain Mgmt; quite an unwarranted slap in their faces for their years of research & study!

I swear, Its a form of grouped genocide in my opinion. So its all about the blocking of the oxytocin release in our bodies! Obviously as well, the filler they r using to block this process is making us very sick! Worst is the fact this was done behind our backs...no testing on us! I’d think that fact in itself would most definitely justify a class action suit for us LEGITIMATE CHRONIC PAIN PATIENTS!

Thank you for letting us finally know the true science behind this & that we are not going crazy after all.

I am so very sorry for your circumstance dear one as we are all being needlessly tortured & falsely branded. The NIH’s Pain Report is a site you & all must link to. They are working tirelessly on our behalf, amen! Please Mark, asap submit your findings to the Nat’l Pain Report; they need your facts & input!

Godspeed!

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To everyone who takes a synthetic opiate...

Please pass along this info to anyone in pain and to anyone who loves or cares about someone in pain! It's the sick reality in American for many years now...

ALL synthetic opiates have been reformulated to inhibit the oxytocin release from the pituitary gland which accounted for 75% of the effectiveness of the drugs! This has been going on for years now since the last president for those of you who try to blame Trump. Trump shows no signs of undoing Obama's nightmare upon legitimately suffering Americans, so his hands are just as dirty in my book! No politician is going to touch this until the public sees all the suicides from uncontrolled severe pain and all the stories of NO quality of life anymore!!! Believe me the government and media are desperately hiding the truth from the voting public because it attacks BOTH political parties!

You wonder why your medications are very ineffective on your pain now? Now you know! Look it up in a PDR aka Physician Desk Reference it will show the oxytocin release has been inhibited. This has absolutely nothing to do with prescribing limits! It's about inferior ineffective medications! Although they've made a lot of doctors prescribe less of a drug that is 75% less effective!
Think about that for a few minutes... That's what I call an outrageous scam and on suffering people too!

Take less of a far less effective drug? The government, big pharma, pharmacists and doctors all knew about this reformulation!
Then they called you addict, you have a tolerance or whatever terminology they could create to sell the big LIE! Look at all those people who lied to your face or omitted the truth for deceptive purposes! That's what I call a truly insane monumental scam on suffering Americans!

Am I angry? I'm still insanely angry and I've known this for a while now. I'm writing this from my bed because I'm in so much pain that I can't tolerate it enough to get out of bed and I'm on 150mg of oxycodone, but it's 75% less effective so get the picture?

I had epidural and peridural abcessess from a staff infection back surgery in 1989 and the hospital gave me IV steroids for 10 days while I had the infection making it a superbug!!! Needless to say I'm severely scared around 6 sets of major nerve bundles and the lower part of my spinal cord. Yes, I am the poster boy of severe pain and they destroyed any quality of life that I ever hoped to have... Outside of palliative care which I've avoided because of a lot of things I'll have to give up... It's taken me sometime to come to terms with what has been done to us! The weakest members of society... And no one cares! It makes me angry and makes me cry because up against this overreaching out of control government I'm going to suffer immensely till the day I die because of addicts who abused my only avenue for some type of quality of life!

This is having alot of unintended bad side effects, but the government doesn't care! Look around medschat at all the different horrible side effects people are having on these reformulated drugs. They got big pharma to do it to stop abuse. They figured if you can't feel high you won't abuse it... But people in severe pain never feel high and our insane non-medically educated government cannot accept that FACT! Where does that leave the people in real pain? The government could care less because stopping addicts from abusing our life saving medications is all their narrow minds can see! Talk about tunnel vision! And it created the biggest herion epidemic in the history of America and yet the government is still trying to blame US the suffering Americans for their enormous blunders...

Don't worry you can't sue anyone! Myself and others have already tried and no law firm will touch it even though it's very underhanded. The government has a stacked deck against us all and no one cares because of the FAKE opioid crisis!

The only hope is to get millions of people to raise cain about this destruction of effective pain medication because of addicts! Why should innocent people suffer in pain because of addicts? Talk about an insane injustice against innocent suffering Americans!!! Only our corrupt overreaching government could be so evil as to think they're helping people! This is true insanity at its highest levels!

Until the voting public is extremely outraged by this nothing will happen! We're the squeaky wheels and if we want justice we have to let everyone know what the government got big pharma to do! Making innocent Americans in pain suffer because of drug addicts! It truly is the most low down injustice that I've seen in many decades!

Now go tell everyone you can the truth! If you get hurt the government has destroyed all pain medications effectiveness and you will needlessly suffer because of this should you be unfortunate enough to become severely injured, in severe pain and live outside a hospital!

Basically because of their failed war on drugs they attacked the weakest members of society who are unable to really speak up because they destroyed their quality of life by destroying the only thing doctors had left to treat severe pain! I personally know of 12 people who've committed suicide because their pain was no longer being controlled by inferior reformulated synthetic opiates! Not because a doctor reduced their meds, but because the medications are ineffective on severe pain!

Do you think anyone in government will be charged with involuntary manslaughter for this? That will never happen even though they're as guilty as can be!

Know that you know what's been done to your quality of life medications, never stop talking about it to anyone who will listen. If a pharmacist or doctor wants to refute this. Tell them, let me see your PDR and I'll show you the oxytocin release from the pituitary gland has been inhibited rendering the medication 75% less effective than before the reformulation occurred! Just look up said synthetic opiate and ask, what happened to oxytocin? Busted!

But the most important witness is US! What is YOUR quality of life been since reformulation to stop oxytocin! That's the most important part of all!

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Re: Susie (# 11)

Walgreens changed it’s supplier and don’t get Watson 10/325 because they say it’s their supplier. I had problems with the Pharmacist telling me he would not stock Allergan the maker of Norco. So I called the head of Walgreens and filed discretion against Walgreens and the pharmacist and am gonna sue them both. Imagine the Pharmacist trying to make me look like a criminal when my Doctor prescribes it to me. See them in court.

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Re: Peggy Sue (# 45)

What were the numbers on yours? Mine are white and have numbers 328 or could be 323. My eyes are awful, so it's not very clear.

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Re: Kelly (# 19)

So did DEA or anybody respond to you because I feel I got fake ones too I have 10 / 325 and I put going to Walgreens because I think I got fake ones I think they had that Tramadol rather than codeine and I also believe that they were white instead of yellow.
Last year I went to Walgreens in December and I thought I had the worst case of the flu for like 6 weeks cuz deathly ill everybody that works like what's wrong with you and I think the whole time I was entain number one cuz it never helped my pain and then I think I was probably withdrawing from the opiates it sucked the only good thing about it was I lost 20 pounds

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Re: Kelly (# 19)

So did DEA or anybody respond to you because I feel I got fake ones too I have 10 / 325 and I put going to Walgreens because I think I got fake ones I think they had that Tramadol rather than codeine and I also believe that they were white instead of yellow

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So did DEA or anybody respond to you because I feel I got fake ones too I have 10 / 325 and I put going to Walgreens because I think I got fake ones I think they had that Tramadol rather than codeine and I also believe that they were white instead of yellow

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Re: Gloria (# 42)

I have found no generic hydrocodone that is very close to the actual name brand Vicodin. I am suing my health insurance carrier becauseTWO pharmacists told me that the generics had been badly reformulate and recommended the name brand to avoid the quality issues.

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Re: w john (# 37)

I have the same problem! My top notch PPO insurance suddenly refuses the name brands. I get very sick on many generic brands. I would appreciate knowing which generic mfg 7.5 325 is closest to Vicodin brand.

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