I’m sorry to hear you’ve had such devastating experience. You might want to go around the corner to another of the thousands of pharmacies that can be found anywhere in order to fill your highly addictive and abused narcotic. Fortunately you will not suffer permanent scaring from such incident with the pharmacist, yet I feel I should clarify for you that your letigious inquiry will fall short of success. Pharmacist by law just like physicians can decide if they will provide a particular drug to someone or not. They are held accountable if they do not excercise this judgement. Surely someone as educated as yourself either with or without the help of stimulant narcotics can look up the federal and state law regulations. In any case, if you are so concerned maybe you should research a bit more.

Although a CA pharmacist may refuse to fill out a prescription if s/he suspects abuse, s/he may NOT deny a prescription for a schedule II drug simply because it is from an out of state doctor.

I had an almost identical situation as yours. I am in CA for an internship and all the pharmacies I went to refused to fill out a prescription for Ritalin from my MA doctor. I even had my insurance company make some calls and the pharmacists even refused to help them.

I then went online to the CA Board of Pharmacists:
http://www.pharmacy.ca.gov/licensing/prescribe_dispense.shtml

Scroll down the Q&A a bit and you’ll find a question about filling out of state prescriptions for schedule ii medications. The answer is:

California Code of Regulations section 1717(d), in accordance with Business and Professions Code section 4005(b), allows written and oral prescriptions from out-of-state prescribers. Pharmacies must verify the prescription. The pharmacist should use his or her best professional judgment when filling out-of-state prescriptions.

A little further down the page is another discussion:

Yes, so long as the prescription conforms to the requirements for controlled substance prescriptions in the state in which the controlled substance was prescribed. The prescription must be delivered to the patient in the other state. Prescriptions for Schedule II controlled substances must be reported to CURES and effective January 1, 2005, prescriptions for both Schedule II and III must be reported to CURES.

Armed with this information, I went to my local Walgreens to get my prescription. They put me through a gauntlet of evasive excuses. “It out of state” (Not a problem according to the Board) “How do I know it’s a valid prescription?” (Call my Dr.) “This info must be outdated.” (I just printed this out an hour ago). Finally, the pharmacist made a call to a friend at the Board to confirm.

Fortunately, the pharmacist was cooperative once I got through these questions. If they aren’t cooperative for you, don’t forget to remind them that it is ILLEGAL to refuse to fill out a prescription unless for valid reasons (in fact I saw a sign posted in the pharmacy that said just that). Out of state Rx is not a valid excuse to deny someone medication.

Hope this helps. The bottom line is that many pharmacies in CA have acquired the misinformation that they must refuse out of state prescriptions for schedule II medications. This is absolutely false.

Seth