Lately I’ve been suffering. I’ve been sleeping 14-16 hours a day, with no desire to do anything else with my time. I’ve been feeling that everything I do or possibly could do is a giant waste, pointless, and without meaning. On top of that, when I am awake I feel strung out, weak, groggy and heavily drugged. I suppose I have slipped into a depression.
I think I know the cause. Kroger, which I use as a Pharmacy, has been changing their manufacturer of generic drugs seemingly every week. One time I even got a pill bottle where half the pills were one generic and the other half were another. This sleeping problem pretty much coincides with the last time I filled my Risperdal prescription, so I’m pretty sure that’s it.
After I started to have this problem, I checked on the pill bottle to see who the generic manufacturer was. It’s a company called Dr. Reddy’s, based in India. Who knows what they’re putting into this stuff, possibly newspaper, possibly sedatives? I don’t know.
Anyway shortly after this problem started I talked to my ARNP and complained of the generics problem. She became incensed and said that differing generic brands can be significantly different from one another. She even said Congress had passed a law that generic manufacturers could put only 80% of the listed dose into a pill, and it would still be considered “equivalent.”
She also told me that drugs have a “closed generic” phase after their drug’s patent expired. During this time only one generic manufacturer is granted permission to make the drug. Then the drug goes into “open generics” where any company can take a crack at it. She hypothesized that because my drugs had recently gone into open generics, that Kroger was searching to find the cheapest / most profitable one. She told me to go to my pharmacist and request pills made by a manufacturer called Teva. They were the original manufacturer of both of them and probably the ones I was on originally.
So I called up Rite-Aid and they informed me that the supplier of their Risperdal and Lamictal is already Teva, so then I had my ARNP phone in new prescriptions (since it’s too early to have them refilled). I’ll probably go pick them up sometime tonight. Hopefully this solves my problems…