Assistant director Tim Benedict says the Ohio State Board of Pharmacy approved the restriction last month because of concerns about paperwork and patient safety.
Benedict told The Columbus Dispatch that if you keep transferring prescriptions around, you're eventually going to have problems.
Several retailers offer incentives for prescription transfers. Benedict says pharmacists have complained they spend too much time dealing with transfers, often initiated on account of coupons.
The one-per-year-per precription limit does not apply to transfers within the same chain, such as between a CVS store in Ohio and another in Florida.
Some consumers are crying foul, especially those without prescription drug coverage who shop around for the best deal.
When fuel prices hit $4 a gallon a few years ago, Brian Brown was paying practically nothing to fill up three cars.
Diagnosed with diabetes, he had several prescriptions. One grocery store chain was offering $1 off per gallon of gas for every new or transferred prescription.
"The syringes, the lancets, everything was on prescription," Brown said, "I'd fill up my truck and three gas cans full of gas and it was all on transferred prescriptions."
"You couldn't pass it up, I mean, a dollar off a gallon, and when they diagnosed me, I had so many prescriptions I was like 'Wow!' I did it all and I literally had free gas, I mean, back then, $4 a gallon, you couldn't not do it."
Pharmacist Tom Lamb is the owner of Sands Run Pharmacy in Akron. He believes that people using just one pharmacy will mean better health practices.
"We, a lot of times, see different interactions that occur between medications that are prescribed by one physician and then they go to a different physician that is completely unaware of other medications they are taking," Lamb goes on to say, "and bringing them to one pharmacy then enables the pharmacist to check all those kids of interactions."
WKYC-TV