At St. Paul Corner Drug, they’re running short on some medicines.  

“We’ll get a bunch in, and then we won’t be able to get any for a long time,” says pharmacist John Hoeschen. “Certainly, the amphetamines have been a problem. The Ritalin, the Adderall, those kinds of medications have been a problem all throughout COVID, and that hasn’t corrected itself.”

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The locally owned Snelling Avenue drug store — in business for more than a century — isn’t alone.

The American Society of Health System Pharmacists (ASHP) reports 323 active medication shortages in the first three months of 2024, a record high.

“This is one of the worst times that we’ve had as far as we’ve been tracking, especially with the total number of ongoing and active shortages,” declares Erin Fox, associate chief pharmacy officer at University of Utah Health.

“The new diet drugs that everybody’s all fired up about, those are very hard to get,” Hoeschen adds. “It’s not a good thing when we rely on foreign countries to produce drugs for us, so that’s part of the problem as well. Raw materials coming from China, finished products from India.”

But ASHP says other drugs used to treat cancer, diabetes and ADHD are also in short supply.

Carolyn Sharratt, with the Minnesota/Dakotas Chapter of JDRF, a nonprofit that funds diabetes research, worries about shortages of insulin.

“It’s a shortage that’s happening on the front end of things,” she notes. “Then that trickles into distribution on everyday people and their local pharmacies.”

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So why is this happening?

Experts cite higher demand and manufacturing shortages.

Hoeschen says there’s a lack of incentive for the big pharmaceutical companies to produce generic drugs that currently are so cheap. That, he says, means fewer manufacturers.

“We see manufacturers drop out of the marketplace and then we end up in a situation where only two manufacturers are producing a particular product,” Hoeschen says. “If one of those manufacturers has a manufacturing hiccup for some reason, if a batch has to be discarded, or if they have to retool a plant or something, suddenly, we’re in a shortage situation.”

Sharratt says the shortages can have dire ramifications for people with conditions like diabetes.

“Type 1 diabetes is an autoimmune disease, and so without an external dosage of insulin, they would not be in a very good place and likely end up in the hospital,” she notes.

The Biden administration is urging Congress to pass legislation rewarding hospitals that buy medications from a variety of drug makers.

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KSTP medical expert Dr. Archelle Georgiou says if you can’t get a certain medication, talk to your doctor about less popular doses that might be available.

She advises checking your pharmacy regularly because while they might be out of a medication one day, they might have a new shipment the very next day.

Meanwhile, Hoeschen says he’s trying to serve his customers the best he can but adds the supply issues are a real problem.

“If we can’t get enough to fulfill the scripts that we already have been filling on a regular basis, then it doesn’t make a lot of sense to bring in more people and create a bigger hole and a bigger problem for ourselves,” he explains. “For some people, it’s a big deal. I mean, it’s the difference between having a normal life and not if you don’t have access to these medications.”