Your hypothetical pharmacy is pretty close to the way it’s done in the real world.
That’s kind of what I figured. Seems more or less like a logical way to run such a business.
Seems patently illogical to me. Like hiring a vegan who has a moral objection to touching meat at a Burger King. You could bend over backwards to accomodate the employee, but I wouldn’t call it logical.
How is this debate being framed? I’m pro-choice as well but I don’t really see how that has anything to do with whether or not pharmacist should be able to refuse to dispense certain drugs.
Based on what?
Why do people feel the need to insult pharmacist? In the past you had to go to school and get a BS in Pharmacy but since 2000 you’re required to become a Doctor of Pharmacy which requires undergraduate and postgraduate work. Pharmacist are not trained monkeys who dispense pills. Regardless of how you might think about this particular issue I don’t understand why so many people hold pharmacist in such low esteem.
Marc
Not exactly the right analogy, I think. Pharmacies carry an awful lot of products, only one of which has anything to do with morning-after birth control…not quite the same as hiring someone who refuses to sell what amounts to probably 50% of the business.
Typically, the pharmacies I go to have probably at least 5 employees working at all times, so there would always be someone to ring up that Plan B sale. It would not make sense to me to refuse to hire someone over something that would probably never be an issue to me, other than to be sure when I am planning shifts that there is at least one person who doesn’t have a moral objection. I don’t consider that bending over backwards. I used to work in jobs where I had to hire & schedule a lot of people for shift work, and I can promise you that something like that would be the least of my problems. There are always situations employers have to work around, this one is very minor by comparison to a lot of them.
I would refuse to fill the prescription. Then I would expect to be promptly fired, and rightly so (presuming the prescription actually was legal and legitimate).
I have no issue with pharmacists who take a moral stand by (effectively) resigning in protest because they refuse to fulfill a job requirement that, in their view, is morally wrong. In fact I can respect that a lot.
I do have an issue with pharmacists who refuse to do their job, then expect not to face the just consequences for it. If you refuse to fulfill a legal and legitimate requirement of your job, you deserve to be fired, end of story.
I tried to post a reply to this a while ago, but my post is still floating around in the cybercosmos.
“Female circumcision” is not legal here, so there is no such kit to legally prescribe. There was a news story the other day about an African immigrant who had “circumcised” his daughter, and was arrested for it. According to the story, he did his gruesome work with a pair of scissors. He didn’t need a prescription to buy his scissors.
I don’t hold them in low esteem; I just hold doctors in higher esteem. I don’t think you can become a physician by correspondence course, can you? If you are not a doctor, I don’t believe you should be allowed to place your own judgment above a doctor’s.
I would liken the relationship to that between an architect and a general contractor. The architect creates the plans, and the contractor uses his knowledge and skill to implement the plan. He does not decide he knows more than the architect and re-design the building.
Well, I would think that interfering with legal transfer of a controlled substance (possibly life-threatening consequences?) would be grounds for something. And maybe there’s a statute regarding criminal assholishness…I sure hope so.
I don’t see how your nitpick invalidates the analogy. You spoke of having to restrict the employee to certain shifts. In my analogy, I wouldn’t even have to do that; I could just restrict that employee to the register, or french fry station, or drinks, or whatever. The point is: why hire them at all when there are suitable candidates who need no such restrictions? It may be a lot of things, but logical it is not.
But it would require either not ever placing that person on the register, or having to switch cashiers or send the customer to a different cashier every time someone wants to purchase Plan B.
Well before, you suggested that you would have to limit which shifts this person could work, which would be a burden.
I’m sure you could do it if you feel really strongly about it and think it’s worth the extra effort, but then that’s a decision based on ideology, not logic or efficiency. And I disagree with the ideology. Plan B does not abort babies; it prevents pregnancy. If you have a moral objection to birth control, I just don’t think pharmacy is the best field for you to get into.
You hire them because it isn’t as easy to find good employees as you might think, and if this was the only problem, then I suspect I would be happy to work around it. It is logical to make certain small concessions in certain areas, because no situation is perfect.
I get it. As I said, minor issue. Send the customer to a different register.
A small one.
No, it’s not a decision based on ideology…it’s a decision based on how much trouble I think the issue is going to cause me. As I said, I have hired people for these kinds of jobs before (and I’m not talking about professionals like pharmacists, I’m talking about cashiers at a pharmacy, as the situation in question is the sale of an OTC medication). This entire hijack started because I don’t happen to have a problem with Plan B myself, so I, at my hypothetical pharmacy, would stock it, and make sure that I have someone who is willing to sell it there at all times. If I found a good employee who fit my requriements in every other way, except they don’t want to sell one specific product that is a tiny tiny portion of my business, it would probably make good business sense to try to work around it. It IS based on efficiency, because the hardest thing about hiring shift workers like cashiers is working around the schedules everyone is available, and changes they want to make, and on and on. Someone who gives me no trouble in any other area, but just doesn’t want to sell this one product would be, as I said, the least of my problems. If it got to be a major issue, and I found that most of my employees were refusing to sell it, I would have to make hiring decisions on that basis.
Even if the person was a pharmacist, most pharmacies have a couple working all the time. What’s the big deal in making sure that there is always one person who is willing to sell the Plan B?
If my “ideology” is at work at all, it is my philosophy that I would be willing to make a tiny amount of effort so that a good employee could follow his or her own conscience in this area.
What about the Hippocratic Oath?
Nor will I give a woman a pessary to procure abortion.
I know pharmacists are not physicians, but the idea of refusing to induce an abortion on moral grounds has been around for millennia.
Many years ago, the Supreme Court of the US ruled that the decision to have an abortion (or not) was up to the pregnant woman and her physician. A generation before that, the SCOTUS ruled that people had the right to buy contraceptive devices (which, at that time, were mostly condoms.)
This issue of pharmacists appointing themselves to the post of morals cops has not come up until the last few years. Now, yet another group is setting up a barrier to the people’s right to control their own reproductive lives. That’s why, as a pro-choice guy, I’m very concerned at the sight of some states setting up another roadblock to women’s rights.
It’s disgusting. We go around pretending that the issues of women’s rights and religious discrimination are in the past. The struggle is not over. There is still a parade of people trying to restrict reproductive rights. There is still a steady pressure on the government to turn certain religious rules into law.
Well then my analogy is pretty apt. The workaround to hire a vegan at Burger King who won’t touch meat is quite minor - just make sure there’s always someone on the floor who doesn’t object to touching meat. Probably even easier than your pharmacy work-around.
But it just raises the question: Why hire them in the first place? Is it really that hard to find someone who will operate a cash register? I somehow doubt it.
Well, from what I’ve been told, Plan B is kept behind the counter so that when someone asks for it, contraindications can be inquired to and addressed at that point in time. I don’t think it’s the only OTC substance kept in this fashion, either. Therefore, the pharmacist, if he or she is responsible, should be inquiring as to other medications that someone might be on before handing it over. Due to the nature of Plan B, I think keeping it behind the counter makes sense.
That said, if someone comes into a pharmacy and asks for a legal substance, and there appear to be no contraindicating situations, then that person should damned well be given that substance. Morals of the pharmacist be damned. If he (or she) didn’t want to dispense medications that go against his morals, then he should have thought of that before going to school and racking up all of that debt.
I don’t know how many medical schools still use the original unmodified Hippocratic oath anymore. Mine didn’t, and it didn’t include the line about abortion.
These guys can go fuck themselves, too. If you drink, some cabbies won't drive - CNN.com
What about it? The Hippocratic Oath begins with an appeal to Apollo and Hygia neither of whom are worshipped by many people these days. It also includes a promise not to share trade secrets with outsiders and not to cut into people. I don’t think anyone takes the Hippocratic Oath these days.
Marc
A poor analogy, but assuming that a DIY kit could get the job done and it was legal in the US, then yes, a pharmacist should sell the kit.
Yes.
Part of the reason I hold pharmacists who refuse to dispense Plan B in such low esteem is because I feel they are being cowardly. Customers are easy targets for their objections. The most effective target to voice their objections to would be the management of the pharmacy, who decides which products should be stocked. But instead they choose to act against customers and hide behind “conscience” policies or statements of morality. If you truly had strength in your convictions, you would give up your job and career for it. You wouldn’t settle for just refusing to sell it.
Aren’t contraindications addressed by the prescribing physician?
Agreed, agreed, and agreed. Which makes it even more infuriating. Plan B is supposed to be as available as a condom. For them to keep them behind the counter already puts it in another class (abortion vs. prevention) in some people’s minds. I think it’s a deliberate blurring of the line to confuse people who don’t know exactly what the drug is supposed to do.