Drixoral

Are ya'll in cahoots with the pharmacies in Canada to gouge us? Are you getting a kick back from the Canada parmacies?? Crazy as it sounds, I just wonder why Canada can get it and the US can't? When will it be available now? Is it because you are merging with Merck for another year delay? If you aren't going to make it, sell the formula to another drug company in the US so we won't suffer anymore, also create some more jobs in the good ole USofA.

(there are several threads re this; I'm posting to all)

Well, it's now March 2010, and I just got off the phone with Schering-Plough/Merck again.

The lady I spoke with said that as of Feb. 15, they have no firm date for the return of Drixoral. She assured me that they were going to start making it again in the same formulation. She said their new manufacturing facility is complete, and they are currently waiting for the FDA to do all their approvals.

She had no explanation for the disappearance of all similar drugs from the shelves since then. I have never seen any of them, and CVS couldn't even find Lodrane in their database.

I think I have connected some dots, though. I did some more looking after reading the last post.
Drixoral was made at Actavis Totowa. You may remember the recall of an entire lot of Digitek a while back, which was twice the normal thickness. That was also made at Actavis Totowa. Here is some interesting reading (you only get a paragraph or two without subscribing, but it's enough):

Actavis Totowa nets warning for QC, cleaning validation: http://www.encyclopedia.com/doc/1G1-162103856 ...

A Federal lawsuit... charges pharmaceutical company Actavis Totowa with manufacturing and distributing defective Digitek heart drug pills...: http://www.encyclopedia.com/doc/1G1-183812064 ...

The US Food and Drug Administration... awaits the court's entry of a permanent injunction that bars Actavis Totowa... from manufacturing and distributing drugs at the firm's Totowa, New Jersey, facilities: http://www.encyclopedia.com/doc/1G1-192079053 ...

It appears that Drixoral disappeared from the market without warning because the facility that manufactured it was breaking a large number of required safeguards, and had just released for sale a deathly-defective lot of Digitek. The lawsuit concerning the Digitek was filed in mid-July 2008 -- at the same time the shelves were running dry of Drixoral. As shown by the previous poster, even the Drixoral was recalled.

My last box was from this recall, but I had already taken one or two by the time I read the previous post last year. No ill effects, so I continued to use it until it was gone. I used it only when I was non-functional, so I was able to stretch it out quite a while. This box was bought in July 2008, the last box I could find anywhere. I had another box I had just started, and I began meting them out with an eyedropper. My last box expired in April 2009, but I made them last into December. By the time I took the last two, they were apparently too old, and did not work.

I am now out of it. Buying it from Canada is prohibitively expensive. Chlorpheniramine maleate helps sometimes, but I usually have to take a couple of doses a bit early in order to gain control. Sometimes, like today, it does not help at all.

Now that I have found this information, I understand. If they had told us what was going on in the first place, I think most people could have handled the whole story reasonably well... much better than the way they mostly kept us in the dark (we're moving our manufacturing, supposed to be out again around the start of 2010, no, no more info than that, here, sign up for notification). They would have been able to look like they were trying to protect the public from a manufacturer that refused to bring their facility into compliance, rather than an uncaring, big corporation that capriciously toys with the health of its customers.

I actually called them back and told the lady I got this time what all I had learned, and that I knew she wasn't the one who decided to keep us all in the dark, but that I hoped she could pass this on to whoever ... that most people are reasonable, and could have handled more information better than the tiny amount we've had all this time.

Here's hoping their new facility gets through the FDA soon!

I've been getting Drixoral from TruMedCanada for 2 years and find it works the same for me. Until finding Drixoral I was miserable ever since Tavist-D was taken off the shelves. My fear is that Drixoral may ultimately become unavailable from any source.