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

Carmen Peterson's son Ethan is a big fan of The Elmo Clubhouse and Mickey Mouse. And although Ethan is not talkative, he loves to sing along in his own way.

“He is a very cheerful 8-year-old boy. He doesn't talk, but he gets his point across,” Peterson says.

Ethan has a rare genetic disease – Singapore1 — which, among other things, causes a seizure of sorts that can cause him to fall to the ground without warning.

“For a moment, everything just stops,” Peterson says. “And the danger of it – and I've seen it – is that it will fall on the hardwood floor, the concrete, off the stairs, like all these things.”

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

Ethan takes a medicine called Epidiolex which prevents these seizures. But last holiday season, a thief stole it from a family's porch in Charlotte, North Carolina.

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

She then had to figure out how to replace that $1,800 medication so her son wouldn't miss a dose. This turned out to be a difficult task.

How many packages were stolen?

December is a busy time for package deliveries and porch pirates who steal them. Thieves sometimes make off with medications in the mail instead of an iPad or Labubu.

E-commerce has boomed during the pandemic, and December remains busiest time of year to deliver packages, according to the U.S. Postal Service.

However, when it comes to packaging theft, it can be difficult to get the full picture.

As easy as it may be to buy products online, getting them to your customers is actually very difficult. This is because so many people and companies interact with the package before it even arrives. Ben Stickle Professor of Criminal Justice Administration at Middle Tennessee State University.

“So it's very difficult to understand what happens from the moment the button is pressed to the moment of delivery, to piece it all together in enough detail to figure out when and where these thefts are happening, and then actually do something about it,” he says.

Stickle worked on the study with the postal service published earlier this yearand says victims of theft report it to different places, which don't share the information with each other or even necessarily record the missing package as a “theft.” And sometimes victims don't report it at all.

“A lot of packages have been stolen,” he says, explaining it. according to research company SafeWisethat's about 250,000 parcels every day. Stickle worked with SafeWise.

The Postal Service estimates that at least 58 million packages were stolen in 2024. “So what is the probability that one of them, without the thief’s knowledge, will contain some kind of medicine?” Nobody knows for sure, he says.

Ways to reduce the risk of theft

So what can you do? Stickle says scheduling deliveries for when you're home and having a hidden delivery location is a good idea. Even an unlocked locker on the veranda is a good deterrent.

“If a thief sees a package, even if it's an envelope on your porch from the road, it's much more likely to be stolen,” he says.

According to Express Scripts and Optum Rx, two companies that offer mail-order pharmacy services, drug thefts are quite rare.

CVS Caremark, another company that mails prescriptions, said it offers package tracking to customers to help prevent theft, but did not respond to NPR's question about how common drug theft is.

Pharmacies including Walgreens say they offer order tracking and use discreet packaging to prevent theft. Customers may also require a signature upon delivery of medications.

“Making sure patients don't miss doses is a top priority,” says Stryker Autry, director of loss prevention and transformation for Optum Pharmacy, part of Optum Rx.

“Especially during the holiday seasons when supplies increase, we want to make sure we provide peace of mind for our customers,” he says. “So if theft #1 occurs, contact the pharmacy immediately.”

He advises also reporting the theft to your doctor and local law enforcement.

Lost recipe replaced

For Carmen Peterson of North Carolina, when she called her insurance company's pharmacy to change Ethan's medication, the answer was no. But Ethan missed a dose and had a seizure that landed him in the emergency room again? Not an option for her.

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

If she had been forced, she would have found the money for the medicine herself.

“It’s just unfortunate that … the company was so willing and kind of willing to just wash their hands of it because they felt like they had done what they were contracted to do, which was deliver the drug.”

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 a fuss about it, including in local media. news stations. 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 your mailbox, work, or simply going to the pharmacy and picking them up yourself.