Headline claim: time delay safes are probably much too expensive in human time costs to justify their benefits.
The largest pharmacy chains in the US, accounting for more than 50% of the prescription drug market[1][2], have been rolling out time delay safes (to prevent theft)[3]. Although I haven’t confirmed that this is true across all chains and individual pharmacy locations, I believe these safes are used for all controlled substances. These safes open ~5-10 minutes after being prompted.
There were >41 million prescriptions dispensed for adderall in the US in 2021[4]. (Note that likely means ~12x fewer people were prescribed adderall that year.) Multiply that by 5 minutes and you get >200 million minutes, or >390 person-years, wasted. Now, surely some of that time is partially recaptured by e.g. people doing their shopping while waiting, or by various other substitution effects. But that’s also just adderall!
Seems quite unlikely that this is on the efficient frontier of crime-prevention mechanisms, but alas, the stores aren’t the ones (mostly) paying the costs imposed by their choices, here.
It seems like the technology you would want is one where you can get one Adderal box immediately but not all Adderal boxes that the store has at the premises.
Essentially, a big vending machine that might have 10 minutes to unlock to restock the vending machine but that can only give up one Adderal box per five minutes in its vending machine mode.
Now, surely some of that time is partially recaptured by e.g. people doing their shopping while waiting
That sounds like the technique might encourage customers to buy non-prescription medication in the pharmacy along with the prescription medicine they want to buy.
I think there might be many local improvements, but I’m pretty uncertain about important factors like elasticity of “demand” (for robbery) with respect to how much of a medication is available on demand. i.e. how many fewer robberies do you get if you can get at most a single prescriptions’ worth of some kind of controlled substance (and not necessarily any specific one), compared to “none” (the current situation) or “whatever the pharmacy has in stock” (not actually sure if this was the previous situation—maybe they had time delay safes for storing medication that wasn’t filling a prescription, and just didn’t store the filled prescriptions in the safes as well)?
Headline claim: time delay safes are probably much too expensive in human time costs to justify their benefits.
The largest pharmacy chains in the US, accounting for more than 50% of the prescription drug market[1][2], have been rolling out time delay safes (to prevent theft)[3]. Although I haven’t confirmed that this is true across all chains and individual pharmacy locations, I believe these safes are used for all controlled substances. These safes open ~5-10 minutes after being prompted.
There were >41 million prescriptions dispensed for adderall in the US in 2021[4]. (Note that likely means ~12x fewer people were prescribed adderall that year.) Multiply that by 5 minutes and you get >200 million minutes, or >390 person-years, wasted. Now, surely some of that time is partially recaptured by e.g. people doing their shopping while waiting, or by various other substitution effects. But that’s also just adderall!
Seems quite unlikely that this is on the efficient frontier of crime-prevention mechanisms, but alas, the stores aren’t the ones (mostly) paying the costs imposed by their choices, here.
https://www.mckinsey.com/industries/healthcare/our-insights/meeting-changing-consumer-needs-the-us-retail-pharmacy-of-the-future
https://www.statista.com/statistics/734171/pharmacies-ranked-by-rx-market-share-in-us/
https://www.cvshealth.com/news/pharmacy/cvs-health-completes-nationwide-rollout-of-time-delay-safes.html
https://www.axios.com/2022/11/15/adderall-shortage-adhd-diagnosis-prescriptions
It seems like the technology you would want is one where you can get one Adderal box immediately but not all Adderal boxes that the store has at the premises.
Essentially, a big vending machine that might have 10 minutes to unlock to restock the vending machine but that can only give up one Adderal box per five minutes in its vending machine mode.
That sounds like the technique might encourage customers to buy non-prescription medication in the pharmacy along with the prescription medicine they want to buy.
I think there might be many local improvements, but I’m pretty uncertain about important factors like elasticity of “demand” (for robbery) with respect to how much of a medication is available on demand. i.e. how many fewer robberies do you get if you can get at most a single prescriptions’ worth of some kind of controlled substance (and not necessarily any specific one), compared to “none” (the current situation) or “whatever the pharmacy has in stock” (not actually sure if this was the previous situation—maybe they had time delay safes for storing medication that wasn’t filling a prescription, and just didn’t store the filled prescriptions in the safes as well)?