What to know if your prescriptions get stolen off your front porch : NPR

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Carmen Peterson’s son Ethan is a huge fan of Elmo and Mickey Mouse Clubhouse. And although Ethan is non-verbal, he loves to sing in his own way.

“He’s a really fun-loving 8-year-old. He doesn’t talk, but he gets his point across,” Peterson said.

Ethan suffers from a rare genetic disorder – Syngap1 – which, among other things, causes a sort of seizure that can knock him to the ground without warning.

“Everything stops for a while,” Peterson says. “And the danger – and I’ve seen it – is that he falls on hardwood floors, concrete, stairs, like all those things.”

She says he was injured and she had to rush him to the emergency room.

Ethan takes a medication called Epidiolex that prevents these seizures. But last holiday season, a thief stole it from the family’s porch in Charlotte, North Carolina.

Peterson remembers finding the box empty, then checking the footage from his Ring doorbell camera. “I see this guy walking away…and I’m just furious,” she said.

Then she had to find a way to replace that medication — worth $1,800 — so her son wouldn’t miss a dose. This proved to be a challenge.

How many packages stolen?

December is a busy time for package deliveries and the porch pirates who steal them. Sometimes thieves make off with mail-order drugs instead of getting an iPad or Labubu.

E-commerce has taken off during the pandemic and December remains the busiest time of year for package deliveries, according to the United States Postal Service.

Yet it can be difficult to see the big picture when it comes to package theft.

As easy as it is to buy products online, getting them to customers is actually very complicated. Indeed, according to Ben Stickle, a professor of criminal justice administration at Middle Tennessee University, many people and businesses interact with a package before it is delivered.

“So it’s very difficult to know, you know, what’s happening between the time you click a button and the time it’s delivered, all pieced together in enough detail to know when and where these thefts are happening and then do something about it,” he says.

Stickle worked on a study with the Postal Service published earlier this year and says theft victims end up reporting it to different places that don’t share information with each other or even necessarily record the missing package as “stolen.” And sometimes victims don’t report it at all.

“There are a lot of packages stolen,” he says, explaining that according to security research firm SafeWise, it’s about 250,000 packages every day. Stickle worked with SafeWise.

The Postal Service report estimates that at least 58 million packages will be stolen in 2024. “So what are the chances that one of them, unbeknownst to the thief, contains some type of drug?” No one really knows, he said.

Ways to reduce the risk of theft

So what can you do? Stickle says scheduling deliveries when you’re home and having a hidden delivery point are good ideas. Even a locker for your porch that doesn’t lock is a good deterrent.

“If a thief can see there’s a package, even if it’s an envelope on your porch from the road, it seems much more likely that it will be stolen,” he says.

According to Express Scripts and Optum Rx, two companies offering mail-order pharmacy services, medication theft is quite rare.

CVS Caremark, another company that ships prescriptions by mail, said it offers package tracking to its customers to prevent theft, but did not respond to NPR’s question about how common drug theft is.

Drugstores, including Walgreens, say they offer order tracking and use discreet packaging to prevent theft. Customers can also choose to require a signature when their medications are delivered.

Ensuring patients don’t miss a dose is a top priority, says Stryker Awtry, director of loss prevention and transformation at Optum Pharmacy, part of Optum Rx.

“Especially during the holiday season when deliveries increase, we want to make sure we provide our customers with peace of mind,” he says. “So if a theft were to happen, No. 1, contact the pharmacy immediately.”

He also advises you to report the theft to your prescriber and local law enforcement.

A lost prescription replaced

As for Carmen Peterson in North Carolina, when she called her insurer’s pharmacy to have Ethan’s medication replaced, the answer was no. But Ethan missed a dose and had a seizure that sent him to the emergency room again? This is not an option for her.

“It feels like it’s one of those things where you just don’t have a choice,” she says.

If forced, she would have found the money to buy the medicine herself.

“It was just a shame that the company was so ready and willing to wash its hands of it because they felt like they had done what they were hired to do, which was deliver the drug.”

That company, Liviniti Pharmacy, said it could not comment on the Peterson family’s experience due to patient privacy laws.

Unwilling to give up, Peterson reported the theft everywhere and made noise about it, including on his local news channels. It worked. Jazz Pharmaceuticals, the company that makes the drug Ethan needs, saw the stories and replaced it within a week.

She now recommends having important medications delivered to a post office box, to a workplace, or simply going to the pharmacy to pick them up yourself.