[alpayton]

Having worked as a pharmacy technician for the past 10 years (and having a dad who's a pharmacist and owner of a pharmacy) I can tell you that it's against federal and Kentucky state law to take back any prescription medication that has left the store.

The reason for this is once it has left the store, the store cannot know what has happened to that medication. Someone (not saying that you would) could tamper with the medication.

There are strict pedigrees that have to be in place for medications, especially narcotics, of which Vicodin is one of. A pedigree tells whose hands those medications have been in and that they have every reason to have been in those people's hands. The people that has had their hands on those medications have licenses to have those medications whereas you do not. Therefore, the general public, once they have been dispensed the medication may not return medication to a store unless it is a tamperproof bottle or packaging such as a tube of ointment or something such as that. Pills that have been put in a store bottle from a stock bottle would not be returnable. Make sense?

Think about it this way. If someone else took their prescription home, decided they didn't want them, but dumped them out in the toilet first, then put them back in the bottle and then returned them to the store, and the store puts them back in the stock bottle and then you come along and get a prescription filled for the same medication and get some of the pills that had been dumped in the toilet, you wouldn't be too happy, but you wouldn't know any better. This law keeps this type of thing from happening.