Charitable pharmacy collects medicines for the poor

Administrators call the
program the ‘pharmacy of last resort.’

CINCINNATI (AP) — Cecil Griffin lost a finger in a slaughterhouse accident where he worked, then hurt his back on a landscaping job. That was when he found out he had diabetes.

“I was losing my vision,” said Griffin, 48, of suburban Golf Manor, who relies on disability benefits and the St. Vincent de Paul Charitable Pharmacy. “I’m on a fixed income. I didn’t have anywhere else to go. It’s been a true blessing.”

Even with some grocery stores offering $4 generics, filling 11 prescriptions for high blood pressure, cholesterol control and other problems would be too costly, Griffin said.

It’s the same with Ruby Isaacs, 71, who, she says, “has lots of health problems” and needs regular diabetes supplies and respiratory and heart medications.

“I’m almost embarrassed when I have to pick up all of them,” she said. “You almost need a shopping bag.”

The St. Vincent de Paul program has been in operation a year, since special enabling language was passed in the Ohio Legislature. Administrators call it a pharmacy of last resort for the unemployed, the working poor who cannot afford prescription insurance and for people who have reached a gap in their Medicare coverage.

“You don’t realize the number of people who fall through the cracks — who lose their jobs or reach that Medicare ‘doughnut hole’,” said pharmacy manager Mike Espel, a former city Health Department pharmacy director. “We help them after their benefits are used up.”

About 500 people have been certified as eligible for free medications, he said, and more than $450,000 worth of pharmaceuticals have been dispensed this year.

“This innovative, private sector initiative is clearly filling a gap in prescription care to those most in need,” said Sen. Bob Schuler, R-Cincinnati, a co-sponsor of the bill that enabled charitable pharmacies to receive and dispense drug samples.

About 20 percent of St. Vincent’s medications are bought with cash donations, Espel said. Most of the rest are samples donated by physicians, and some are donated by nursing homes, hospices and manufacturers. He can take care of about 90 percent of his clients’ prescription needs.

St. Vincent’s appeals to physicians for their excess samples, offering to help with paperwork and state licensing requirements.

“One thing we absolutely need is for physicians to support this,” said Liz Carter, St. Vincent de Paul’s executive director.

Some pharmaceutical sales reps probably aren’t enthused about physicians giving away samples, but nobody’s raised a fuss about it, Espel said. In fact, many drug companies have programs to provide free or nearly free drugs to people who need them and can’t pay.

The Partnership for Prescription Assistance, an arm of the Pharmaceutical Research and Manufacturers of America, lists about 180 programs offered by pharmaceutical companies that provide 2,500 brand-name and generic prescriptions to low-income, uninsured or underinsured people.

PPA’s TV ads with celebrity spokesman Montel Williams show a big, orange bus rolling into disaster sites. The Washington-based organization has helped get needed drugs to more than 4.4 million people since it began in April 2005, according to spokesman Ed Belkin.

“We launched the program after we discovered that a lot of these programs are administered through physicians’ offices,” Belkin said. “Because of all the paperwork, they were becoming bookkeepers, and that took time away from them being physicians.”

About 12 to 15 physicians are regular contributors to the St. Vincent inventory in Cincinnati, Espel said. He also gets medications from nursing homes and the state’s Drug Repository Program, which distributes previously sold but unused, unopened drugs that would otherwise be thrown away.

That program, the first in the nation, came about in 2003 because of a Canton-area man who was frustrated because there was no way to make use of thousands of dollars of already-purchased drugs after his wife died of cancer.