Carmen Peterson's son Ethan is a big fan of Elmo and Mickey Mouse Clubhouse. And although Ethan is nonverbal, he loves to sing along in his own way.
"He's a really fun-loving 8-year-old. He doesn't speak, but he gets his point across," Peterson says.
Ethan has a rare genetic disorder — Syngap1 — which, among other things, causes a kind of seizure that can make him drop to the ground without warning.
"Everything just kind of shorts out for a moment," Peterson says. "And the danger of that — and I've seen this — is him falling on hardwood floors, concrete, off of stairs, like all of these things."
She says he's gotten hurt and she's had to rush him to the emergency room.
Ethan takes a medicine called Epidiolex that prevents these seizures. But last holiday season, a thief stole it off the family's front porch in Charlotte, N.C.
Peterson remembers finding the empty box and then checking her Ring doorbell camera footage. "I see this guy walking off … and I am just livid," she says.
Then, she had to figure out how to get this medicine — worth $1,800 — replaced so her son didn't miss a dose. It turned out to be a challenge.
How many stolen packages?
December is a busy time for package deliveries and for porch pirates who steal them. Sometimes the thieves run off with mail-order medication instead of getting an iPad or a Labubu.
E-commerce took off during the pandemic, and December remains the busiest time of the year for package deliveries, according to the U.S. Postal Service.
Still, it can be tricky to get the whole picture when it comes to package theft.
As easy as it is to buy stuff online, getting it to customers is actually really complicated. That's because so many people and companies interact with a package before it's delivered, according to Ben Stickle, a professor of criminal justice administration at Middle Tennessee University.
"So it's really hard to get, you know, what happens from the point that you click a button to when it gets delivered, all put back together with enough detail to find out when and where these thefts are occurring and then actually do something about it," he says.
Stickle worked on a study with the Postal Service published earlier this year, and says that victims of theft wind up reporting it to different places that don't share information with each other or even necessarily record the missing package as "theft." And sometimes victims don't report it at all.
"There's a lot of packages stolen," he says, explaining that according to security research company SafeWise, it's about 250,000 packages every day. Stickle has worked with SafeWise.
The Postal Service report estimated that at least 58 million packages were stolen in 2024. "So what are the odds that one of those, unbeknownst to the thief, has some type of medication in it?" Nobody really knows for sure, he says.
Ways to lower theft risk
So what can you do? Stickle says scheduling deliveries for when you're home and having a delivery spot that's hidden are good ideas. Even a locker for your porch that doesn't lock is a good deterrent.
"If a thief can see that there's a package, even if it's an envelope on your porch from the roadway, it seems to be far more likely that it's going to be stolen," he says.
According to Express Scripts and Optum Rx, which are two companies that offer mail-order pharmacy services, medication theft is pretty rare.
CVS Caremark, another company that ships prescriptions by mail, said it offers customers package tracking to prevent theft, but didn't answer NPR's question about how common medication theft is.
Pharmacies, including Walgreens, say they offer order tracking and use discreet packaging to help prevent theft. Customers can also opt to require a signature when their medicines are delivered.
Making sure patients don't miss a dose is a top priority, says Stryker Awtry, the director of Loss Prevention and Transformation for Optum Pharmacy, part of Optum Rx.
"Especially during the holiday seasons when deliveries surge, we want to make sure we build in peace of mind for our customers," he says. "So if a theft were to happen, No. 1, contact the pharmacy right away."
He says to also report the theft to your prescribing doctor and local law enforcement.
A lost prescription replaced
As for Carmen Peterson in North Carolina, when she called her insurer's pharmacy to get Ethan's medicine replaced, the answer was no. But Ethan missing a dose and having a seizure that put him in the emergency room again? Not an option for her.
"It's just like it's one of those things that you just don't have a choice," she says.
If forced to, she would have found the money to buy the medicine herself.
"It was just unfortunate that the … company was so ready and kind of willing to just wash their hands of it because they felt like they had done what they were contracted to do, which is deliver the medication."
That company, Liviniti Pharmacy, said it couldn't comment on the Peterson family's experience because of patient privacy laws.
Unwilling to give up, Peterson reported the theft everywhere and made noise about it — including on her local news stations. That worked. Jazz Pharmaceuticals, the company that makes the drug Ethan needs, saw the stories and replaced it for her within a week.
Now, she recommends getting important medicines delivered to a P.O. box, a workplace or just going to the pharmacy to pick it up yourself.
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