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Comment by spdustin | Hacker News Reader

None of these services has scheduled meds, so ADHD folks, keep going to your local pharmacy.

Getting controlled substances is such a nightmare in the USA. Prescribers can't have renewal scripts, they can't prescribe for more than 30 days at a time on a single script...

If you have ADHD, you have to see your doctor every 30 days? Or do they have to fax the pharmacy a new prescription constantly?

You have to reach out to them and ask them to send in a new prescription every month. If they use something like Epic its easy enough to just go into the app and request a refill with a few buttons.

Shrink that we see writes one for 30 days at a time, but he write 3 of them.

Local pharmacy is out on the regular too. As I understand it, there was some sort of DEA thing that is wreaking supply chain havoc.

Manufacturing capacity has not kept up with demand, but the shortage situation is close to passing.

https://www.nbcnews.com/health/health-news/adhd-drug-shortag...

Maybe. But... a few drugs disappeared for several months in Europe. I'd expect an increase in diagnoses to result in an intermittent supply, not zero supply.

As shortages hit the US and Europe at roughly the same time, I'm wondering if it was supply chain issues - maybe a precursor chemical all manufacturers source from the same supplier?

(Writing this in the hope that someone with more knowledge than me chimes in).

It's gotten a lot better (for me at least) in the last six months. For about a year and a half I had to call around checking inventory before calling my doctor. It made me feel like a junkie and I hated it.

In an ideal world there would be some sort of middleman connected to pharmacies, you have a preferred list of locations, the script automatically gets sent to the one with inventory, and you get notified which pharmacy to go to. Unfortunately no pharmacy would ever opt into this because it would mean risk of losing business. However, if the big pharmacies just offered this feature for their own locations I would definitely always send my script to them.

> For about a year and a half I had to call around checking inventory before calling my doctor.

The other improvement here is that the DEA started allowing pharmacies to transfer patient prescriptions for controlled substances, so you don’t need to call your doctor and hope they send it out to the location with inventory quickly enough.

But only once, to keep life arbitrarily difficult. Gotta make life easier through more rules, never fewer!

https://www.dea.gov/stories/2023/2023-09/2023-09-01/revised-...

The DEA still has some restrictions on moving inventory between pharmacies, which can still prevent pharmacies from balancing supply and demand in a way that’s transparent to end-users.

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