Recently I wrote of boycotting Walgreens pharmacies due to their refusal to carry Barr Laboratory generic Adderall. Along with hundreds of readers of this blog, I feel that the CorePharma pink Adderall is inferior to the Barr version, but Walgreens insists they are “equivalent.”
But that is far from being the only reason one should avoid doing business with this shady pharmacy. Here are others:
dru wrote @
I am so so glad i came across your website. I have taken 10 mg of the orange pills for 14 months. last tuesday i switch to the pink ones since then i have had extream muscle pain. I have been so worried this explains it. any one elese please email me thanks
calla wrote @
Do not flush meds!! They end up in our water supply !!!
http://www.dec.ny.gov/chemical/45189.html
P.S. I hate the pink pills as much as everyone who has been posting (they make me jittery & give me headaches…plus make me crash horribly).
gab wrote @
glad I found ur website. I share many of your feelings and thoughts about adderall/adhd – I’m predominantly impulsive type…fun, right?
Anyhow – I used to work at Walgreens, I agree the pink ones are crappy, I’m not particularly fond of the round E404 ones either, I like the Barr; no jitters, just a way to get through the day without being a complete jackass, they work. Since the law changed a few months ago (now you can get 3 month supply at a time) I use mail order. I got the E404 ones this time but Barr last time b/c my insurance companies switched pharmacies, but I intend on finding a way to get Barr again.
So – my suggestion is: ask Walgreens to special order for you. They can. We used to do it all the time, especially for people who wanted a certain generic of pain meds, also Schedule II substances. If possible, take the ndc number 0555-0974-02 (for barr 30mg) to them and they can usually order from another supplier, since their warehouse only carries core pharma. If your super nice about it, or persistent enough, you can likely get it. At least at the one I worked at.
If u have insurance – find out who your mail-order pharmacy is, find out what manufacturer they carry, then -this may be the hard part – get a dr to write for 3 months at a time.
Hope that helps.
And thanks for sharing your thoughts here, I don’t know anyone else like me, so it’s good to hear that someone else feels the same.
M. Frederick Voorhees wrote @
gab-
It’s amazing how often I hear that from fellow A.D.D.ers. Blogging has been a rewarding experience for me in that regard. We are not as unusual as the world makes us feel sometimes.
And thanks for the advice re: 3 month supplies.
Joe wrote @
I’ve taken both the pink and orange and had really disliked the harder edged orange pills feelings to the mellower pink 30mg.
I had headaches from the orange and jitterieness.
Now I know we all have slight differences in physioligy and I’m able to better get things done using the Pink 30 mgs.
Also since I have no insurance Walgreens perscription program cut my cost from CVS’s $120 for 60 count of the 30 MG Generic to $56 for Walgreens Pink 30’s.
When I had insurance I never bought generic but now I’m forced to get what I can.
Joe
M. Frederick Voorhees wrote @
Hi Joe-
Thanks for your feedback. I know its not always easy to leave feedback on a blog when yours is the minority view. I wasn’t even aware that CorePharma (the pink company) produced a 30 mg version of Adderall. According to this, they don’t.
http://www.pharmer.org/category/tags/amphetamine
ADD’er wrote @
I am soooooo pissed right now. I just picked my script of Adderall and it’s the f’ing PINK pills.
I took them right back and of course they can’t do anything. Just last month they had the Barr brand generic. Thanks for telling me about the switch…. It is such a pain to a new script written before my next scheduled appt. Oh well, I will just have to lose a few hours of work to get this taken care of. CVS or Kroger’s is where I will get my script filled next time.
Lou wrote @
Wow, I never took the pink pills, but I had a horrible time with the orange Barr ones this past few years. Some months I would fill my prescription, and it was like taking cold medicine instead of ADD medicine! Cold medicine makes me mean, addled, and raises my blood pressure. Definitely not a good experience.
The first time I was certain it wasn’t just me (maybe allergies kicking up bad that month, or a virus or stress) I called the pharmacy and they assured me it was the same medicine as last month. Sure looked the same. Said Barr on it. Okay, maybe I was just losing my mind every few months. Shrug. I kept taking it. Eventually I made the horrible mistake of giving up on it in disgust during a crucial time in my life. Disaster.
But it wasn’t until a year ago that I realized I wasn’t crazy, and the medication wasn’t simply too low a dose (I had taken it for two years by then, so later, after I’d been on generic again for about a month, when my doctor upped my dosage, I decided this explained the random medication failure I experienced). One month, I filled my prescription as usual, took my usual dosage, and it didn’t work. Just raised my blood pressure and made me even meaner than the malfunctioning lower dose did.
Even so, I must have a respectful streak. Or stupid naive streak, really. I stopped taking the adderall and quit my job because no way could I afford the brand name and my doctor wanted to start me on a half dose of the brand name time release if I did decide to take it anyway. Well, even when the stuff worked, it didn’t work all that well, no way would I be able to function on a half dose.
So here is where stupid and naive come in. A year later, I spent over five hundred dollars to fill a time release adderall prescription. Obviously, being jobless, I wouldn’t be able to keep that up, I even took half doses most days to make it last. Well, the month ended, and I still had my generic bottle. So I thought, hey, maybe it was all in my mind. That job did stress me out pretty bad. Maybe it works just fine. And I took a half dose.
It was not all in my mind. Generic Barr adderall is crap. Someone needs to have a talk with Barr’s QC department. Someone needs to look into where the real drug is going some months. Cause it sure isn’t going in the prescription bottle!
Go brand name if you have insurance, and only brand name. If not, get insurance, and meanwhile, be sure to kick up a huge fuss about any problems caused by any ADD medication, whatever color the pill. Cause something is seriously wrong here.
Frederick Voorhees wrote @
Lou
Everyone agrees the brand name is (was) the best, but it really doesn’t exist anymore. As for your month on the time-release stuff, I’m wondering how you managed to take half doses without breaking all the little balls out of their capsules, in which case they would no longer be “time-released” and you effectively wasted $500.
Every now and then Shire Pharmaceuticals (who introduced the original Adderall brand in 1996) sends some obvious representative to my blog to try to put out all this propaganda that ALL generic brands suck, and that only the original Adderall is worthwhile. Which is all fine and good, and may well be true. However, that’s no reason to take the time-release version if the nature of time-released medication doesn’t work for us. If Shire is so eager to maintain market share, why not re-release their original, regular release brand at a reasonable price. ESPECIALLY if y’all are the only ones with the REAL recipe.
chris wrote @
ok hey yea wal greens switched my fifteen mg instant release which is supposed to say ad and 15 on other side to this new med that has dp and 15 on other side they by far taste the same and the new dp ones dont seem to work at all im not happy about it and would like to get my med switched but doc wont do it till after its been a month i want the ad labelled pills cuz to me the other ones labeled dp are nothing but sugar whats going on here really i dont abbuse the medication one bit all pills i get always accounted for but still i just want something that works right!!!
mrgoldvoyc wrote @
I was glad I checked out this site and I the reason I did was because I had been getting the BARR orange 20mg from Kroger, but they were out today so I went to Walgreens which I really dont like but said they had them in stock and I got my pills and when I got home saw they were pink!!!!!! But I know things change all the time so I took one and It was like I had not taken anything and I got a headache a few hours later. There is a difference, I will try a taking the pink’s again but they dont seem to be as effective so far.
Nyla wrote @
I am so pissed at Walgreen, I had 4 scrips to fill, and called them for a quote. of course when I went to fill them they were 170.00 more than they quoted me AND they wanted me to pay 20.00 to join their program. I was pissed! I picked up 2 of them, my ADD med because and my thyroid med because I was comp. out… and will fill the others at Walmart. I too was surprised when I saw the pink pills, not to mention my thyroid meds look different. I have been on them 6 days and last night I could not stand it any more. I laid down at 4:30 to take a quick nap, after 2 days of not being able to keep my eyes open. I did not wake up till 8:30 this morning. I slept for 16 hours. I have never in my life done that! So, this morning when taking my meds, I thought maybe they made a mistake on what they gave me… and that is how I stumbled onto this website. Now I am just mad. Not only did my meds cost me more there but now they are making me so so sleepy. I cannot tell you what it was like the last two days trying to drive long distances, and then last night I just collapsed! What can I do now? My script is filled. I get it filled on a 90 day supply. Am I just stuck with these till they are gone? I don’t think I can take it that long! The last 4 days my neck has been stiff and my legs feel like I’ve been running a marathon. How can I switch back to the others not that this is filled for 90 days???
HTML-Tags:
<a href="" title=""> <abbr title=""> <acronym title=""> <b> <blockquote cite=""> <cite> <code> <pre> <del datetime=""> <em> <i> <q cite=""> <strike> <strong>
Get a free blog at WordPress.com | Theme: Fjords by Peterandrej
I recently started adderall (generic 30mg) and I went to CVS and they gave me 25 orange pills, and 5 pink round ones, and told me next time I’d probably have all pink, but they were the same thing. So i started with the orange for about 5 days, and they were wonderful, I was focused with motivation (not crazy high on speed like somepeople talk about) and then I had reached in and grabbed a pink one on the 6th day. WIthin an hour I almost felt like I had taken a vicodin. My body didn’t want to move I felt like I was walking through molasses and eventually lethargic, but my brain was awake. Eventually my heart started racing ( I monitor my rate regularly,as well as my blood pressure, just in case) and my blood pressure went up, my face was red, my head was pounding and my neck was so stiff and hurt so bad. I knew it had to be the pill, but thought maybe I was just getting sick, so I went back to orange for a few more days, and then tried the pink one again, same things happened. It felt like having a horrible hangover, but being jittery pepped up on too much coffee. AWFUL! I flushed the rest of the pinks. If CVS is out of the orange when I go get it filled again, I will go to every pharmacy within 50 miles to make sure I never take another pink one.