Narcotics Contracts & Handling Your Medicine

Understanding Narcotics Contracts in North Carolina

If you enter a formal, structured pain management program, you will be required by the doctor to sign a narcotics contract, or some similar document. This document will require you to promise to take your pain medicine exactly as prescribed and take only those medicines.

You will be required to give a urinalysis sample or mouth swab. If the urinalysis or mouth swab shows drugs other than those prescribed or an unusually, unexpectedly low amount of narcotics concentration in your body, you will be terminated as a patient. You may also be required to bring your medicine to appointment to that the doctor can do a “pill count.”

The Importance of Properly Handling Your Medication

Even though it may seem like no big deal to take a spouse’s medication to manage your pain or to take an old prescription that had been prescribed to you to deal with a tooth ache, taking drugs that were not prescribed to you for a specific injury can lead to a doctor dropping you as a patient.

On the other hand, not taking your prescribed medicine can also cause a doctor to terminate you as a patient. They may wrongfully assume that:

1. If you are not taking your medicine, you must not need it.
2. If you are taking a lower dosage or not taking all of your medicine, you must be selling it.

If you are terminated from a pain management program due to alleged violation of your narcotics contract, it is highly unlikely another doctor will accept you as a patient, meaning you will be unable to get the treatment and pain medicine that you need.

Guidance From Experienced Workers’ Compensation Lawyers

At Law Office of Lyndon R. Helton, PLLC, our attorneys know the steps an injured person needs to take in order to ensure a proper relationship with a doctor and to avoid being dropped by a medical professional. If you require our help because of an allegation regarding your narcotics contract, call our Hickory, North Carolina, law office at 828-328-9966 or 888-321-0494 (toll free) or send us an email.