Ophthalmic drug abuse: An observational study from community pharmacies

There has been a trend in the past five years in Jordan for ophthalmic anticholinergic preparations to be misused or abused. This is done mainly to experience mental altering effects such as mood changes, euphoria or hallucinations. Such products are mostly obtained from community pharmacies without a prescription.

This study aimed to observe the requests of ophthalmic preparations in community pharmacies in Amman, Jordan, and evaluating the most popular and frequently requested ophthalmic drops suspected of abuse. Also, it aimed to describe the current methods that Jordanian community pharmacists use to manage such requests.

A prospective cross-sectional observational study was conducted between November 2016 and January 2017 at sixteen different community pharmacies in Amman. All ophthalmic products requested were observed during this period.

A total of 140 ophthalmic product requests for 130 customers were observed. Dry eye was the most common complaint for which the customer requested the medication (n = 30, 23.1%) and direct self-medication (ie-requesting the product by name), was the most frequent method of purchase (n = 63, 48.5%). In 19 cases (14.6%), product requests were suspected to be for non-medical (ie-abuse) purposes. Most of the suspected cases were for Pentolate^® (n = 11, 57.9%), whereas 7 were for Prisoline^® (36.8%) and 1 for Naphcon-A^® (5.3%). The majority of observed cases were for products requested without a prescription (n = 16, 84.2%), and in 12 cases out of which, sale was refused (63.2%).

More effort and enforcement of pharmacy regulation for safe dispensing is needed to reduce the abuse of ophthalmic products. Educating pharmacists and ophthalmologists would help raise awareness and control the type of drug abuse.