Legislation challenges criminality of prescription pill container shift

AUGUSTA – While visiting her family in Maine, Emily Harbor parcels out her prescription drugs, placing each day’s dose in a separate cubicle of her pill box. Every time she does it, she’s breaking the law.

In Maine, a prescription drug must be kept in its original pharmacy container until the time it’s consumed. Putting it anywhere else – perhaps in a shirt pocket, or a separate container like Harbor uses – is a crime that can bring jail time.

The purpose of the law isn’t to entrap people like Harbor, but rather to aid police as they go after illegal drug traffickers. The law helps police to verify through the container’s labeling that the drugs belong to the person possessing them.

Drug enforcers acknowledge the technical reach of the law, but don’t want to lose any weapon in their battle against drug crimes.

“Prescription drug abuse has gone right through the roof,” Roy McKinney, director of the Maine Drug Enforcement Agency, said Friday. “Officers come into contact with pills more often than they did nine or 10 years ago.”

The issue prompted Emily Harbor’s son-in-law, state Rep. George Bishop, to sponsor a bill to allow a prescribed drug to be kept outside of the container in which it was dispensed. Relatives would be allowed to help prepare the drug for consumption for the person for whom it was prescribed.

“For my mother-in-law, myself and any of you who may have inadvertently taken a walk on the wild side by simply moving your prescription pills, please consider the corrections this bill offers,” Bishop, R-Boothbay, told a legislative committee earlier this month.

The Health and Human Services Committee since then has sought further review of the thorny issue by the Judiciary Committee, but the matter has yet to be resolved.

“It’s a perplexing issue,” said McKinney, whose agency took no position on the bill during the March 7 hearing. McKinney said police are not out to bust grandmothers who parcel out their daily medications in pill boxes, noting that a legal container is usually near the dispensers.

Common sense must prevail, said McKinney, adding, “We’re willing to discuss the issue.”

But Bishop said Friday the law creates opportunities for abuse, as it did in a case recounted during the committee hearing by Wilma Tatlock of Boothbay Harbor.

In that case, Tatlock’s daughter was stopped by police, who found a pill outside of its container in her possession. Police found no other pills or drugs during strip and cavity searches they conducted.

The medication the girl did have had been prescribed for shoulder surgeries she had undergone. Although she produced documentation of the prescription from the drug store, prosecutors followed through with their case. The girl ended up pleading guilty to possession of the drug outside its container.

Bishop also questions the logic of the present law, saying that the labeling on a prescription container really means little unless the pills inside match the prescription. Put another way, police should be more concerned about the content of pills they seize and have them analyzed, he said.

The pill container law also raises safety questions, Bishop said. Some people, notably the elderly, use pill boxes to avoid taking too much medication in a day.

While control of illegal drugs is on the legislative agenda in a number of states, a group that monitors state houses says it is unfamiliar with pill box issues like Maine’s coming up elsewhere.

“I’ve never heard of this happening before,” said Karmen Hanson, senior policy specialist for the National Conference of State Legislatures.