Emerging Drugs of Abuse

This is actually one of the first projects I worked on while here, there is some pretty interesting information available as well. So in one of my first Policy and Procedure (P&P) meetings the managers were discussing large shifts in inventory and possible methods to track this over time. Large shifts in inventory generally happen for a few reasons, either one the drugs are seasonal (like dispensing more Zytec and Claritin during the beginning of allergy season), a new drug/generic hits the market, or something fishy is going on. In this case the issue arose because there was a spike in ordering Viagra which when investigated was the result of the drug being sold illegally by certain parties (I'm not nameing names because I honestly don't know who, it was before the summer). For the outpatient pharmacy there was already a procedure in place that would track trends in Narcotic and Control medication purchases, this service was actually provided through our vendor. Nathan thought it would be interesting if I were to research Non-narcotic and non-control prescription medications that have street value.



This actually turned out to be harder than I thought as if you google drugs of abuse or drugs with street value you always get a long list of narcotic and control meds which is not what I needed to find. It would be interesting if other students would like to take on this problem and compare what they find to my conclusion. The results were actually surprising, some normal prescriptions drugs have the potential through their side effects to cause responses that people will pay good money for, crazy I know. I was actually able to produce a list of 30 emerging drugs of abuse that were neither narcotic, controlled, or otc.



The topic then changed from how do we now give this information to the 180 employees of outpatient pharmacy and nearly 200 employees in inpatient pharmacy. There are various options from an inservice meeting to newsletter. The problem then arises that even given the level of technology and accessibility to the information, alerts and information don't typically find their way to the people who need it. Now my project has taken on a life of its own as I want to evaluate the various media sources I have and decide on the best way to give this information to all parties. Quite frankly if I am going to do all this work, I want to make sure everyone is listening.