I assume the earlier thread referred to pharmacists who object to birth control and abortion. In following their beliefs, they refuse to dispense birth control pills, emergency contraception (Plan B,) and abortion-inducing drugs. Some even confiscate the prescription slips after refusing to fill the prescription.
I’m a pro-choice guy. My call on this issue is that any pharmacist who won’t fill a legal prescription should have his license pulled. Any who also steal the prescription without filling it should also be fined.
Some drugstore chains yank any renegade druggists out of contact with customers. Some states have ruled the same way I would. Some states went to the other extreme, passing laws to allow the “pharmacists of conscience.”
Now, if this is enough to get you started, have at it. I never saw the original thread, so I don’t know if it had played out before it vanished or not. If you already had said everything you needed to say, then just let this thread drop to the back page and fade away.
I think it should be criminally prosecuted. I mean, what’s to stop a nutcase from pulling other drugs they object to…say a Scientologist who doesn’t believe in antidepressants or someone who objects to a drug because he doesn’t feel it was tested long enough? Or someone who would hold off on hormones in the case of a transgendered person? No fuckin’ way. Lock 'em up.
Okay, you’re a pharmacist somewhere in America. A customer from west Africa comes in with an apparently legitimate prescription for a home Female Circumcision kit. Amazingly, your store has one in stock.
You can bet I’d be calling the doctor who made that prescription. If it is, somehow, legitimate in America, I’d fill it. I’m not a doctor, or an ethicist- I’m a pharmacist. It’s my job. The price of being good at your job is that you have to do your job.
Couldn’t happen. That’s why we have the FDA. They would never approve it. If you’re a pharmacist, and you think you’re such a badass with your on-line degree from Joe’s School of Pharmacy that you know more than the FDA, you’re out of your mind. Doctors shouldn’t be prescribing anything that’s dangerous or counter-indicated. If they are, then that’s a problem, but the problem is not solved by pharmacists with less training second-guessing them and overriding their decisions.
As Lightin’ says, call the doctor and confirm, but pharmacists shouldn’t get to just unilaterally override their decision.
What the earlier thread referred to was a situation where the pharmacist refused to sell an OTC drug (Plan B contraceptive), which was apparently in stock at the store, but behind the counter where the customer could not get to it. The OTC nature of the drug makes the lisencing of the pharmacist irrelevant, I think.
It’d be a pretty poor pharmacist who had no idea that these things existed, and the store stocked them, so the time to take a stand is before you take the job.
The state has set up a barrier between me and the drug companies for prescription drugs-- namely, a pharmacist. Because of that, I agree that pharmacists should be required to sell any drug that is FDA approved and if they don’t, they should lose their license. The problem arises, though, when a drug store owner refuses to stock certain drugs. You could require the pharmacy to stock them, but I don’t know how you would enforce that. However, any pharmacist that refuses to sell a legal drug to someone with a valid prescription should be booted from the program. We grant them a license to sell pills to us, not to make moral judgements about which pills we should take.
This is compelling. What if home euthanasia became legal for the terminally ill? I’d expect most pharmacists would be torn on this issue…to some people there isn’t much moral difference between euthanasia and abortion.
Would you expect pharmacists to quit if the pharmacy decides to stock the pills?
Just because a doctor prescribes something and it’s legal doesn’t mean there aren’t moral issues left to deal with.
I think the correct measure to take is to make sure there is someone available to fill the prescription at any given time, if you can staff accordingly. If not, then you have to make a business decision to either not stock the pill or hire someone who will dispense what you stock. And if you’re the pharmacist caught in that situation you have to make a career decision at that point. Not every pharmacy has to stock every legal drug.
What if you filled Gladys’ prescription and her husband Homer offed himself with the pills. Would the pharmacist feel responsible for that death? Nah. He’s the middle man. He shouldn’t take any more credit for negative results from drugs than he should for the positive ones. If he fucks up, that’s a different story. But his job is to dispense medications; not comment on anyone’s use of them.
If they feel so strongly about it that they will refuse people service, yes. Yes, that’s inconvenient and likely unpleasant for them, but it’s a poor sort of morality that regards inconveniencing or harming other people as fine, but not yourself.
Yes I would. In the same way as I would expect a convenience store clerk to quit if the store started selling marijuana after a change in the law, and the clerk felt it morally wrong to sell that. Or if, as a lawyer, the law was changed and it required all licensed lawyers to do something I found morally objectionable, then I would have to put up with it or quit. I’d fight against that requirement being put into place, but once it was, I would have to make that career choice.
There are many ethical choices we do not allow pharmacists (or other professionals) to make while at work. I have no problem whatsoever with a requirement that says a pharmacist must sell anything in stock to someone legally entitled to purchase it (I am sure there are loopholes here but I would have to think about what they were). On immediate thought, I wouldn’t have an issue with a requirement that any licensed pharmacist must fulfil any prescription if it wished to stay licensed, and should be required to order any drugs it does not have in stock. I accept that issue is harder, and I am sure there are results of that I have not considered fully.
Absolutely! He would also be perfectly within his right NOT to fire his ass if he didn’t want to.
I agree, and up to the owner of the pharmacy whether or not to allow some employees to get away with not selling it. Personally, if I owned a pharmacy, I would carry it, and give any individual employee the option not to be involved with the sale if they didn’t want to be.
I think that the person who took that option may find themselves a little more limited in terms of what shifts they were offered, in my hypothetical pharmacy.
That’s fair. I don’t agree with you, but I have a lot less issue with that position if it is certain that the refusal to serve would never place the customer in a position where they were unable to receive service.