"The department is aware of it and we'll have more information on that later," board spokeswoman Thometta Cozart said. However, the three professionals said state civil rules forbid doctors from prescribing drugs without a name or under a third person's name, as a way to prevent people from passing medicine to others.
"That would be considered a fraudulent prescription," said Lisette Gonzalez Mariner, a spokeswoman for the Florida Medical Association, the trade group for doctors. "You cannot do that. It's not commonly done and that's illegal." Likewise, pharmacists cannot dispense drugs to someone other than the name on the prescription label or their representative, said attorney Edwin Bayo, a former general counsel of the Florida Board of Pharmacy licensing board.
In other Rush news:
The Miami Herald reports:
- He had 29 viagra pills
- The patient name on the bottle was that of his doctor
- Possession of drugs prescribed to someone else is a second-degree misdemeanor.
USA Today Reports:
- [Rush's actions] violated customs rules, says Jennifer Connors, a U.S. Customs and Border Protection spokeswoman. Names on prescription drug bottles must "match the name on the travel document," she says.
- A no-label bottle might have been safer:
Passengers flying domestically don't have to carry a prescription or have a labeled bottle, although the Transportation Security Administration website encourages labeled medications. Spokesman Darrin Kayser says, "Our focus is security; we're not as enforcement-focused as (customs), looking at 'whose drugs are those?' But it's good to have a prescription label , so it's clear."
- Rush was not targeted. He was flying in from the Dominican Republic on his own plane.
Connors says: "We go through most people's bags" on private aircraft coming in from overseas.
Yet this AP news article says
Prosecutors say under Florida law, it's generally OK for a doctor to prescribe medicine in a third party's name if everyone knows and it's clearly documented.
Ok, legal eagles and investigative journalists out there: I've tried and failed to come up with a state of Florida statute or agency regulation or a FDA reglulation or federal statute that says a doctor can prescribe a medication, even a non-controlled substance, to a patient in the name of a third party. Can anyone else find one?
Physicians can't prescribe to themselves. So a second doctor had to write the prescription in the name of Rush's doctor knowing that it would be Rush and not Rush's doctor who would fill the prescription and use the medication. How is that not a misrepresentation?
