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Author: Admin | 2025-04-28
Fill their prescriptionsAt his pharmacy outside Seattle, Molitor learned that the customers trying to fill Adderall prescriptions from telehealth providers had been turned away from other pharmacies. Despite what he called “serious and time-consuming detective work,” he could not verify from the available information that the prescriptions came from a licensed provider, as legally required, and he declined to fill them.Molitor said he felt badly for the patients. They spend money for a telehealth subscription, he said, “thinking they are going to get something out of it.”The continued shortage has perplexed providers and added stress for families, with the source of the shortage remaining elusive. No one, it seems, has a full picture that captures where the breakdown occurs within the complex web stretching from the companies that manufacture Adderall to the pharmacies that dispense it. But data showing the volume of Adderall prescriptions offers clues.Prescriptions for a range of drugs to treat ADHD rose 19 percent, on average, between 2018 and 2022, according to a Post review of data from IQVIA, a health-care technology firm. Adderall and its generic versions, however, increased by 35 percent over that time, with the sharpest rise coming during the past two years.The soaring prescriptions for Adderall, compounded by shortages in the supply chain, created a tight market that became increasingly vulnerable to disruption, said Timothy Wilens, an ADHD expert and chief of child and adolescent psychiatry at Massachusetts General Hospital.Many pharmacies have monthly limits on how much of a controlled substance they can order from their wholesale supplier, according to industry experts. When patients start shopping around to find a pharmacy that has their medication in stock, it does not take long for some stores to start selling out, creating these “local bottlenecks,” Wilens said.“All you need is five or 10 families to do that and you have used up the supply in that Walgreens,” Wilens said, adding that the FDA expects the shortage to start to resolve itself in April, but experts are hesitant to provide a timeline because the shortage has already gone on for months longer than initially expected.Lenard Adler, the director of the adult ADHD program at NYU Langone Health, said the shortage has been a hardship for his patients. “I had one patient who had to go to 14 pharmacies before they finally found their prescription,” Adler said.A problem in the Adderall supply chainThe FDA announced an Adderall shortage in October 2022. One large producer, Teva, had reported manufacturing delays. The DEA limits manufacturers to a quota of the active ingredient for controlled substances, but the agency says companies have not hit their limits in the past three years.“We are aware that the pharmaceutical industry is claiming that there is a quota shortage for the active ingredients in ADHD drugs,” the DEA said in a statement. “Based on DEA information — which is provided by drug manufacturers — this is not true.”Justin Schroeder, global vice president at PCI Pharma Services, a contract manufacturer and distributor, said in February
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