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Drug Vending Machines
An anonymous reader writes "If you guessed San Bernardino County prisons as the ideal place to put drug vending machines, come claim your prize. From the article, 'Corrections departments are responsible for so many burdensome tasks that many of their everyday functions, like administering prescription drugs to inmates, are afterthoughts for the public. However, dispensing medication was so laborious and wasteful for the San Bernardino County (Calif.) Sheriff-Coroner Department that officials sought a way to streamline the process. The end product was essentially a vending machine that links to correctional facility databases and dispenses prescription medications.'"
Flushing drugs down the toilet isn't the problem. The problem is that a large portion of many medications taken are simply peed away. Good luck telling people not to urinate in the toilet when they are taking antibiotics or birth control pills.
Gone!
Thats not what a Catch-22 is.
My wife currently works as a nurse at the prison system in Maryland. Part of her duties include passing medications to the inmates. Unlike medications that most of us are familiar with, most of the medications are not coated. Those that are in capsule form are opened and poured into the drinking cup. Anyone found to be regurgitating medicines have theirs crushed and dissolved in water in the future. There are also limits on certain medications that prohibit their usage (think some of the pain medications that have codeine are included on this list for example).
I think she'll agree with some of the assessment about topics in the article that were listed as wasteful. I'm not sure that a vending system solves all the problems without creating new ones. The GP mentioned ensuring the inmate is taking the medications, but add to that taking them properly, inmate interaction with the nurse for reactions to the medication or other problems, nurse assessments, etc.... My wife works in one of the psychiatric sections so I'm not sure some of the inmates would be able to function using a system like this.