drug samples in pediatric offices

This morning, as I was catching up on the news in between patients, an article in the NY Times caught my eye: http://tinyurl.com/42ttru. Upon seeing the title, I immediately thought the article would address the issue that drug samples do not come in child-proof containers; however, it actually addresses another serious issue with drug samples which is drug safety.

The pharmaceutical industry gives samples to physicians generally of the latest, "greatest," most expensive drugs. These often have not been tested on pediatric populations yet. This is quite concerning when one considers some of the black box warnings which end up coming out, as happened with Elidel, among others. It is attractive, however, for physicians to use the samples they are given, but difficult for the family if the drug works and they then have large co-pays to cover. I have to admit that, working at a community health center, I don't see much in the way of pharmaceutical representatives, except for those representing immunizations. The majority of my patients have medicaid, so I stick with those formularies as much as possible.

I would like to bring up the point I made earlier, though, and that is patient safety of sample packages. Our pharmacy encourages us to put all samples in child-resistant containers, print out a label like with a regular prescription, which has exact dosing on it, and to print out the drug information to hand the family with the sample. Now, if that sounds like a lot of work, it is, especially when I am the pharmacist dispensing the sample while seeing a full load of patients. Yet, I think it's worth the time to prevent an accidental ingestion. For example, one of the few samples I have is chewable Singulair. This comes in a foil push-out packet (I don't know the official term for this type of packaging). If a child gets a hold of one of these packets, it would be very easy to play with it and pop out one of the yummy pills...chomp chomp. Fortunately, this is not a terrible dangerous drug, but nonetheless... Do most offices dispense samples using this tedious process? Or is there a simpler way of doing it? I am open to suggestions. It just strikes me as odd in this litigious world we live in and especially as safety-conscious pediatricians, we allow this to continue. Perhaps we need to start bugging our friendly pharmaceutical reps! Any takers?