A 2004 case arose from drug firm Walgreens which mistakenly gave the parents of a five-year-old child Methitest, a steroid for older males, while Trey Jones instead needed Inderal to control tremors.
While pharmaceutical industry data said rates of prescription error is less than 1 percent, taking into account that 3.7 million drugs were sold in 2006, the amount of wrong medicine would still be five digits a year.
A USA Today review of the policies and mistakes done on the U.S. two largest drugstore chains, Walgreens and CVS, indicate that the proportion of pharmacists to prescriptions to fill in is very wide.
Sales staff work very long hours with little breaks, leading to errors. There is also so much emphasis on speed that pharmacists at Walgreen only have two minutes to fill in a prescription. There were only 240,000 pharmacists in 2007, with almost half the number employed in large chains. A 2007 survey by the National Association of Chain Drug Stores said parts of 42 states suffer pharmacist shortage.
Like many doctors who get commissions from pharmaceutical companies for prescribing certain brands, pharmacists too receive incentives for reaching a certain prescription volume.
While the wrong prescription often do not cause major health problems, at times it can be disastrous. Since September 2006 Walgreens had three cases that led to the death of the medicine buyers and cost the company $61 million.
Walgreens maintains it has sufficient safeguards in its system to ensure errors are pared down to a minimum. Most of wrong drug prescriptions are human errors, which may turn out too costly for both the drugstore and the patient.
