The narcotics and psychotropic drug control laws were recently revised to enable the transfer of narcotics between narcotic retailers. However, there has been no study on the effect of this change to the law.For this reason, we studied whether there are any problems to this change in the law.We sent questionnaires to pharmacists at 3000 community pharmacies as a representative national sample, and 1036 responses were analyzed (response rate: 34.5%). Only 20.2% of pharmacists in community pharmacies answered that it is easy to obtain or transfer narcotics by applying for permission to transfer narcotics between narcotic retailers. The majority of pharmacists found the process to be difficult. The reasons for this included the complicated application procedure required by the regional bureau of health and welfare, and problems with the control of the prescribed narcotic's distribution as it is possible to apply only once for the supply of prescribed narcotics for the same patient. Furthermore, pharmacists cannot obtain the narcotics from a stock pharmacy. These results suggest that the current system of requiring permission for transfer of narcotics between narcotic retailers is inefficient and inadequate for maintaining a sufficient supply of narcotics for controlling the pain in cancer patients living in certain areas and overly complicates the procedure of obtaining narcotics by community pharmacies. It is important that the control of narcotics in Japan is changed to more closely resemble that of other commonly available prescription drugs, and allow narcotics to be obtained from stock pharmacies. Palliat Care Res 2010; 5(2): 213-218