'One Pound of Mofeen': Is the Old Pharmacist Story Real? Published Sept. 19, 2009
Rating: Legend
It's a made-up story...
this post was submitted on 09 Jul 2025
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The amount of confused euros ITT is hilarious. Yeah, the states is very backwards. Paper prescriptions, paper checks, paper social benefits cards. What most people don't realize, like in the meme, just because a pharmacy gets a prescription doesn't mean they don't call into the docs office to confirm the script. These are rituals from a bygone era that should have been long replaced by computers and near instantaneous communication.
Central EU, I get my prescriptions on paper. They also send them digitally to some system so I can simply walk into a pharmacy and pick up my stuff using me e-ID.
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There was a time when all you needed to call in a prescription in Denmark, was the doctors authorization number... Which was publicly available. Sure if you called in a prescription at a pharmacy across the country or sounded suspicious, the pharmacy would make a call back, but other than that all you had to do was pick a doctor in an area with lots of other doctors and near a large pharmacy, and you'd get whatever you liked.
It must have been so for +10 years before a journalist and a doctor blew it up, by having the journalist phone in prescriptions for morphine, barbiturates, and other recreationally applicable substances. I don't know if a doctor can still phone in prescriptions, but the immediate stop gap was to only accept prescriptions accompanied by the doctor's personal, and crucially private, SSN.
Most prescriptions aren't on paper anymore though. I have heard that Japan (a very tech savvy country) is actually worse than us with checks and faxes and certain other low/old tech solutions. Not sure if that is true but either way I don't think the US is unique in this stuff.
Yeah, occasionally, we'll request a paper one if we think we'll need to fill it at a random pharmacy, like when we're on vacation or it's for something that's likely out of stock.
Most US pharmacies seem to have problems transferring a script between locations, even within the same company.
Hmm, I recently had to deal with switching pharmacies (in the US) mid-prescription and I didn't really have any trouble. Went from CVS to a family owned shop.
It's not all the time... But, for example, last week, my wife had one sent to a CVS, apparently 10 minutes after they had closed. They didn't fill the script, but they did bill the insurance and were unable to transfer the script to a location that was open later.
About six months ago, I tried to transfer my script from our local target to another target nearby that actually had the item in stock. They said they'd transfer it. I drove over. They didn't have it. They tried to call the originating target CVS but they wouldn't pick up the phone.
Between the two, we decided to look into a mom and pop shop (of which there are precious few around us) the one close enough to make sense told us that our doctor was too far away. They were about a 20 minute drive back to there we used to live and we liked them. They were a #$%^ Johns Hopkins practice.
Walgreens f'd me over once because they couldn't scan my license. I had just renewed it for realID so my plastic license had expired. I had the paper DMV your license is valid and will come in the mail, use this paper in conjunction with your existing license until your new license arrives. I was trying to pick up a non-narcotic muscle relaxer because I fucked up my back.
I really really really hate pharmacies anymore. I should probably just order my shit online.
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to go
Yea you're going nowhere after a pound of morphine, I tell you hwhat.
You are. You’re going to SPACE.
Ah, yes. The one place that hasn't been corrupted by capitalism
I usually just take a gallon of PCP
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Oh? You won’t be dining in with us this evening?
the other typo makes it really hard to figure out whether "mophine" should have a [sic] on it...
According to the snopes article that someone else linked in this thread, mofine is spelled incorrectly on purpose. This is a make believe story with overt racist undertones; the "r" sound in morphine has been dropped to imply that the rx thief is a black person.
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Well it wasn't signed with doctors handwriting pgp, so it was sus
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It's still hard for me to believe that this is how pharmaceuticals are secured.
Pharmacist: "Should we dispense this potentially dangerous drug, it's a large quantity?"
Other Pharmacist: "Of course, look at the paper, it has the correct letterhead!"
It's basically like doctors sit around with a stack full of signed blank checks in their offices, and every once in a while someone steals one and makes a huge withdrawal.
It used to be fairly normal, the pharmasists knew the various doctors in the area, and they also know what is a reasonable prescription. If there was any doubt, they'd contact the doctor before dispensing the drugs. I had the 'interesting' experience of having to go to multiple pharmacies, filling part of the total prescription at each, when I tried to fill a largeish morphine prescription for a family member. There'd been some sort of issue at the main supplier, and none of the induvidual pharmacies had much stock left. It was resolved a few dats later fortunately.
Things are a lot more digital now-a-days, which hopefully makes fraud less of an issue, and definitely makes getting medicines easier.
They also used specific medical names for things and scribbled them horribly so they'd be hard to read if you didn't know what you were looking for.
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There are quite a few special requirements that need to be met for narcotics to be dispensed. Can they be ignored? Yup! Also, there should be some numbers run first and in many states an online check is required as well.
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Nothin’ mo fine than a pound of mofine.
If true, this is incredible.
True or not, I would argue.
If it's fun to pretend, then I'm fine pretending.
Unless the thief has real good insurance, they better have brought their life savings to the pharmacy with them.
100 pills of 30 mg morphine each cost 36 $, that’s 3 g. So 1 g is 12 $.
One pound is around 450 g. So it’s about 5000 $ total.
A decent amount of money, but if you resell it on black market you can make a big profit.
Gotta spend money to make money!
United Health Care's response to this prescription:
"Nah, we ain't paying that. We've determined the fair and reasonable rate is a stick to bite down on; don't be a pussy."
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Thief: "Whers MA daM MOPHINE!"
Plastic surgeon, RX pad, script, Mofine... I guess Mofine is the new guy they sent to collect at the pharmacy. Italian surname by the looks of it. RX relates to a racecar of sorts, not surprising since surgeons are said to be wealthy. Not sure about the script part though : do pharmacists typically double as programmers ? or is it like, a movie script ? in which case it might just all be cinema. There's more to this message that we understand right now. Keep digging, Mofine. We'll get 'em
RX as opposed to TX. Receiver and transmitter in radio communications
Thanks !! the fog of war is slowly clearing
He framed a phone call?
I'm guessing, the RX Pad can be used to print a prescription on a piece of paper?
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Do you need a straw with that?
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