What Is The Best Generic Version Of Wellbutrin Xl - Watson Or Anchen? (Page 45)

My doctor will not prescribe generic Wellbutrin XL but my insurance will no longer pay for brand name drugs. I will have to pay about $7000 per yer for what I am taking now (3 of the 150mg Wellbutrin XL brand name per day). I am reading that the problem with the generics is the time release mechanism and not the drug itself and that some are better than others. Anybody have experience with the generics made by Watson and /or Anchen?

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Direct success is a good program. Its been almost a year I've been using them. My insurance doesn't cover anything I pay 50.00 dollars a month VS almost 600.00 for branded and 95.00 for generic but I had the same issues as most of the forum with inconsistencies in medication depending on where it came from.
They come in the mail in the wellbutrin branded bottle. And it took a day to get it taken care of.

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You are lucky if you are only paying $20 extra for your meds I have to pay $400 for 30 pills of the brand name wellbutrin. I was one of the people who tried the generic and after 3 weeks was more depressed than I had ever been before. Does anyone know how I can make my insurance company haha Medicare to accept more of the charge due to the parents of the generic wellbutrin?

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I'm on Medicare and get the name brand Wellbutrin for $50 a month thru mail order from Direct Success Pharmacy. Their phone # is 877-404-3338. It's the real Wellbutrin. The pills come in the actual Wellbutrin bottle. They will get you set up and then you will get your doctor to fax or email them the prescription. It's great! No more generics!

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Forget your insurance company entirely. Go with the Direct Success Pharmacy and pay $600 total for a year's supply of brand Wellbutrin XL.

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Direct success pharmacy look them up

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Has anyone had luck with paying the $50/month on their credit card, and then submitting the receipts to their insurance company? I mailed in my January prescription yesterday, and I'm hoping that they will send me a check for $35 (normally my insurance pays 70%.) You would think that they would rather pay $35 than $500+, which is what Direct Success charges them if they bill them directly.

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It nay be less exoebsive if you got 1-300 pills and 1-150 pill instead of 3-150 pills.

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What are her reasons for no generics for wellbutrin?

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Sami, if you read through this whole thread (if you have a spare 30-40 hours LOL) you can see that there is a long history of Wellbutrin and generic problems. Because of some particular circumstances, the generics do work differently, and it seems to matter to some fraction of patients. Also, some manufacturers seem to have problems with quality control -- my experience with both Par and Activis is that some batches work as well as brand and some don't. The 150mg generics are closer to brand than the 300mg generics, but reputation is really important with drugs, so Teva and Watson both pulled all of their versions of the generics when problems were found with their 300mg versions. And, finally, there have been a boatload of mergers and acquisitions in generic drug manufacturers in the last couple of years, so when two companies merged that make wellbutrin generics, nobody knows which recipe the merged company is using so history isn't necessarily a good guide any more.

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There were no problems whatsoever with TEVA Budeprion XL 300 mg and TEVA Budeprion XL 150 mg for me and many others. But the FDA pulled it from the shelves anyway and forced me and many others into other generics which were disasters for us. Yet the FDA didn't pull the generics which didn't work for us from the shelves. The warning literature which came with TEVA Budeprion XL (as well as all other brand and generic forms of bupropion) specifically say to discontinue usage of that drug if it doesn't work for you. But these warnings provided by TEVA were ignored by the people who continued to use it anyway and complained to the FDA about it. The FDA had to be aware of the warnings provided by TEVA. There had to be fraud involved when the FDA pulled TEVA from the market and kept other generics on the market. I don't know what the nature of what the fraud was, but it had to be there. Otherwise, the FDA would have had to pull every generic from the market. If you take note, they didn't.

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I'm sorry that you lost access to Budeprion through this whole mess. I know how much it sucks when you find something that works and it disappears. Having said that, the timeline of events doesn't suggest fraud by the FDA.

In terms of generics, Budeprion was outselling its rivals in late 2006. But within three months, a lot of adverse reports started to stream in to places like The People's Pharmacy. People were complaining of feeling suicidal and other troubling feelings. It got more and more media attention, yet the FDA dragged its feet, claiming it was all just "coincidence". Soon it was revealed that Budeprion's time release mechanism was breaking down too fast, releasing half the drug within about 4 hours. One guy even had a seizure because of this, and won a $4.5m settlement.

The FDA asked Teva to do a study on the problem, but Teva couldn't find enough participants. Eventually the FDA did its own study in 2012 and finally accepted what was being said back in 2007 i.e. that Budeprion was not bio-equivalent to Wellbutrin. That's FIVE years later. They asked the other manufacturers to do their own evaluations, which they did.

Was that unfair to Budeprion? Not really, because most of the serious complaints were specifically about that brand. I don't see how it could have stayed on the market when it was a danger to some users. As we all know, pharmacies switch generics randomly, so had it stayed, more people would have had adverse effects. The only solution was to pull it.

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A slight correction, Eric. The 150mg dose was evaluated -- by Teva and everyone else -- at the time that the original generics were engineered. The time release mechanisms were close enough to equivalent for the 150mg dose. At the time that Wellbutrin was invented, it was believed that the time-release didn't matter. The mechanism was believed to be that you take the drug every day and it takes a few weeks for your blood levels to rise to a level that is therapeutic. If you read your patient information packet, they still tell you to expect that the drug will work that way. The only reason that they added a time-release to the pill was that they discovered a small-but-real risk of seizure, so this was an add-on to reduce the seizure risk without changing (what was believed to be) the underlying action of the drug.

When a drug goes generic, they evaluate generics against brand by recruiting healthy volunteers and giving them the drug and then analyzing their blood at 1 hour, 4 hours, etc. and measure how the generic drug gets taken up and how the brand gets taken up. Notice the term "healthy volunteers" -- these are NOT patients who need and benefit from the drug. Because of the seizure risk, which rises as the dose rises, and because they thought that only the total amount of drug mattered and that the time release was just a safety thing, they didn't evaluate the 300mg.

All of this was completely reasonable based upon the completely reasonable assumptions that they were making.

Teva and Watson both took the 150mg off the market when the 300mg was shown to be different. The reason that they did this is that they are hypersensitive to their reputation, litigation and political attacks, and the different effects between 150 and 300 is too subtle a distinction when the risks to the companies are that high. So the next time you are launching into a frothing rant about evil pharmaceutical companies and FDA conspiracies, remember that these are not harmless. I would be much happier to be spending $6/month on Teva or Watson 150mg generics than $50/month on brand.

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The fraud of the FDA is their refusal to admit to the public that years of collected field data has proven that there's not a single generic form of Wellbutrin which will duplicate the effects of Wellbutrin for everyone. Testing is meaningless if it can't correlate with field data. The only way the FDA could recover from this fraud is to pull every generic off the market. You can't double talk your way and dance around field data. I'm a retired defense industry engineer and I can tell you that anyone in the defense industry who attempted to hide or ignore the effects of field data would go to prison. Yet the FDA does this without consequence.

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CF: Thanks for the additional background on Wellbutrin history — it was helpful. Since reading that, I came across a legal memorandum from the 2010 litigation against Teva/Impax. It was interesting because it spelled out some extra details. When Biovail formulated Wellbutrin XL for Glaxo in 2003, they used their patented Smartcoat membrane as the time-release mechanism. This solved a dosing problem which was occurring with Wellbutrin SR. Because SR used an erodible matrix (i.e. a slow-dissolving tablet), the drug was getting absorbed in the upper GI tract, so taking it with food would actually accelerate its release, leading to “dose dumping.”

Anchen and Watson developed their own permeable membranes, but Teva/Impax stuck with the matrix system (which, btw, makes for a much larger tablet). Studies showed that the Budeprion 300XL tablets released 34% of their drug during the first hour, versus 8% for Wellbutrin 300XL. So Budeprion definitely had a much different release profile than Wellbutrin. But the question still remains as to how similar or different the other popular generics are i.e. Anchen (Par), Actavis and Mylan. It’s pretty disappointing that there still isn’t enough public data about this.

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For those interested in buying brand Wellbutrin, I have come across another source via Canada. Price is $106 for 90 tablets of 300mg XL, and the vendor is CanadaDrugStop. They are PharmacyChecker and CIPA-certified, so there should be no issues with authenticity or service. That works out a good deal cheaper than Direct Success ($150), and is getting down towards the cheapest uninsured price for generics ($91).

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Hi I tried to get get Direct Success yesterday. My Dr. Had filled out the form and faxed it to them. Direct Success called yesterday and when they asked for my insurance I told them Medicare and was told as of Feb. 1st 2016 it is no longer available to state or government insurance. has anyone else heard this?

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At least according to the information I got 2 years ago when I signed up, all government insurance refuses to participate with Direct Success. The deal with insurance is that Direct success charges an insurance $500-$800 per month, and tells the insurance company that you are paying the co-pay, and then just doesn't bill you for the co-pay. As opposed to you paying $50 and the insurance company paying zero directly to Direct Success.

You MAY be able to find an insurance company form that will let you submit the $50 charge and have them reimburse you for part of it, but that depends upon the rules of your Part D supplement company. This would be the form you fill out if you need to fill a prescription while traveling in a foreign country, or you forgot your drug card when you went to the pharmacy, etc. It's worth it to track down the form and try to submit your receipts and see if they will pay anything.

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I can report that at least one insurance company will pay their share of the $50/month if you send in your paperwork. My ins company has a 30% co-pay for prescriptions, and I sent in my Direct Success paperwork, and last weekend a check for $35 came in the mail. Now I just need to figure out how to get them to reimburse the other $15 out of the flexible spending account.

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I'm on Medicare. I told them I don't have insurance and pay the $50 per month. No part D plan is going to pay for name brand Wellbutrin. That's why I am happy to pay $50 out of my own pocket to get name brand and quit worrying about those awful, dangerous generics!

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Same here. For $600 a year you can forget about insurance company, FDA and generic nonsense.

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