How Should I Carry My Prescription Opioids When I Leave Home?

By Crystal Lindell

Personally, I carry my daily dose of morphine and Norco in a Tylenol bottle whenever I leave the house. Just two or three pills rattling around in there, mixed with some regular OTC pain meds and a couple of TUMS thrown in for good measure.

I have been taking prescription opioids on a daily basis since 2013 and, like all long-term opioid users, I had to figure out how to store and travel with controlled substances.

A lot of guidelines you’ll get from your doctor about this seem to be based on the idea that anyone taking daily Norco must be spending all day, everyday in bed.

But if you have chronic pain, you know the truth: The whole point of daily opioids is that they help you get out of bed.

I take prescription opioids so that I can work, spend time with loved ones, and run errands.

In other words, I specifically take them so that I can leave the house. That means, a lot of the time, when I’m popping a pill with a bottle of water, I’m not at home.  

Unfortunately, this reality doesn’t mesh with some of the absurd rules a lot of pain patient contracts have. I’m supposed to store all my pills in their original bottles at all times. I also have been told that they will not be replaced if stolen.

As such, I can only assume that the people who wrote those contracts envision pain patients being bed-bound with a locked safe on their nightstand that they can only open when a dose is due. 

Because that’s the only scenario where it would make sense to keep all your pills in their original bottle. I highly doubt that my doctor actually wants me walking around Walmart with 53 hydrocodone pills rattling around in the original bottle, just in case I need to take a single pill before I get home.

That’s a massively high-risk situation. 

If anyone robbed me, they would walk away with almost a month’s worth of my prescription. And then, based on my pain contract, none of them would be replaced – even if I filed a police report. So I’d literally just be forced into immediate opioid withdrawal.

And I’m not exactly going to carry around a locked safe in my purse to keep the pills protected. That’s absurd. Anything that would actually keep the pills safe from a potential robber would be way too big to carry around with me as I browse the clearance section for pajamas.

Of course, this all means that if I ever run into legal trouble, a cop might wonder why I have a Norco pill in the Tylenol bottle in my purse. 

Some states allow for "reasonable repackaging" of medication into more convenient containers, like a daily pill planner. But state laws are usually more strict about controlled substances being kept in their original pharmacy container, because that makes it easier for the police to verify the medication is yours.

I fully understand that I could get in legal trouble, but I personally would rather risk that scenario than the possibility of a month’s worth of my prescription being lost or stolen during a trip to Taco Bell.

So yes, I keep some of my prescription opioids in a bottle that they did not originally come in. And yes, I mix them with other pills in that bottle. And while that scenario comes with some legal risk, I think it actually comes with much less personal risk. 

And, I will add, the rest of my prescriptions are always at home in their original bottles, safely stored in a very secure locked safe.

I’m not a perfect pain patient, but I’m not sure there’s any such thing. All we can do is all we can do.