Except, it doesn’t grow on trees. Its creation is carried out in a factory and then it must be distributed by a specific class of persons whose membership is carefully controlled by the state. It is not up to that state licensed individual to decide he doesn’t like Suzy, or doesn’t like her medical choices, or doesn’t like the color of her shoes, so he won’t allow her to fill her legal prescription. That is not his personal freedom, that is an attempt to limit her personal freedom while claiming oppression if he’s not allowed.
We are also not mandating that Phil give her Plan B. We are mandating that if Phil wants to be a pharmacist, then he must be willing to dispense any and all legal medicines to their proper recipients, barring incorrect dosages, harmful interactions, and the like. We will not roust Phil out of his bed and haul him into the pharmacy in irons. We will not press gang Phil into the Pharmacy Corps and force him to rove the nation, dispensing Plan B. We will say that in order to obtain and/or keep his slice of the government sanctioned monopoly, he must dispense any and all legal prescriptions without discrimination.
It’s no more a limitation of “personal freedom” than for a company to decide that its employees must show up in uniforms rather than being naked, or than the government already telling pharmacists that they can’t give percecet away like candy and instead they can only give it to folks with a prescription. Even if Phil really, really wants to give that cute girl some percacet.
It is difficult for me to view changes in licensure requirements for health professionals as a gross imposition on personal freedom, seeing that a certain amount of your “freedom” is already limited by the nature of your job to protect the public interest, and because such changes occur in a number of health professions on a continuing basis (physicians and other practitioners). I doubt MDs entering the profession years ago foresaw that their peer review and malpractice history would be submitted to a federal data bank, that Medicare or Obamacare would come about, that they’d have to take ethics courses as a condition of keeping their license, or any one of a number of changes. It hardly seems unreasonable that pharmacists who have a duty to serve the public would have the nature of that obligation spelled out when some of them decided their personal views should take precedence over patient interests.
Potentially being forced into an unwanted pregnancy seems a bit more consequential to me than the annoyance of knowing a private citizen is growing rosebushes (to use Bricker’s example), but maybe that’s just me.
If states can engineer a compromise wherein emergency meds must be procured by all pharmacies and made available to patients in a timely manner (and ensuring that Conscience Pharmacists do not sully their pristine morals by individually handling nasty medications), that’d be acceptable to me.
What do you think the law said in regard to a pharmacist’s duties prior to this? “Pharmacists licensed by the State of X must fill all valid, legal prescriptions, subject to the exceptions set forth in [section about drug seekers] and the times they don’t feel like it”?
Well, as long as it’s the state (vs. the feds) I agree you have every right to, assuming your real goal is dispensing medication. I say that, of course, because the recent trial evidence as to Washington State showed otherwise. I argue it’s a bad idea. I disagree with the weight you assign to personal freedom and the weight you assign to the value of dispensing Plan B.
I can only conclude that you don’t really understand the concept of personal freedom – or perhaps more accurately, that you don’t understand my concept of personal freedom.
I’ll try to show you by distinguishing examples.
The association with a particular company is voluntary. You’re right that a company demanding that employees wear uniforms infringes on personal freedom, but the actor there is the company. As a private entity itself, it’s free to do what it pleases with respect to working conditions, and its employees are free to leave. Byy the same token, if a private firm like CVS announced that it would fire any employee who refused to fill a Plan B prescription, I’d be fine with that.
You’re closer when you mention Percocet. There are other reasons that a pharmacist may be legitimately barred form dispensing Percocet – it’s not his intellectual property and he must agree to the terms for dispensing it laid out by the company, for instance – but even if the manufacturer said, “Hand it out like candy,” the government – state or federal – can restrict it. The only difference is that the government is forbidding something, rather than mandating it.
Still, it’s a close analogy. And it’s permissible in my eyes because I weigh the harm caused by widespread distribution of Percocet to be sufficient to make that kind of restriction on liberty palatable.
[QUOTE=CA Business & Professional Code]
Notwithstanding any other provision of law, a licentiate shall dispense drugs and devices, as described in subdivision (a) of Section 4024, pursuant to a lawful order or prescription unless one of the following circumstances exists…
[/QUOTE]
shrug Hard to find old administrative rules. You asked for a law and I gave you one. Or, we could just wait for Hirka T’Bawa or someone to come along and tell us whether as pharmacists they were expected to fill all valid prescriptions.
Are all pharmacists required to stock all possible prescriptions? If the pharmacy does carry Plan-B and refuses to give it to a specific individual, that sounds like a violation of the law.
However, if the pharmacy does not have Plan-B in stock, then it appears that the pharmacist is not violating the law in refusing the prescription, because, well, he can’t.
Of course that could be for moral reasons, maybe they have a tough time being reimbursed by insurance, or post a loss for Plan-B pills.
That’s some rather extensive myopia. Apart form the fact that our entire conversaiton focused on the law as it was prior to the arrival of Plan B, the very post you responded to said:
When you responded, you deleted that first sentence, which was the one that mentioned “the law in the past.”
You’re in law school now. You know the difference.
Regulation is fine but regulation should not target religion. The regulation in questions ays you can fail to stock something for all sorts of reasons but religious belief is not one of them.
Our entire conversation focuses now on your refusal to agree that as a general principle, pharmacists were supposed to fill prescriptions. Let me ask you this: if the law was previously silent on the issue, did that mean a pharmacist could refuse to fill a prescription for any reason?
No. In both cases the government is being used to infringe on freedom; the pharmacists are trying to use their government mandated position as drug gatekeepers to oppress women. The difference is that on the other side the government is “infringing on freedom” the same way it infringes on my freedom to beat up and rob people; it’s protecting others.
So; we have one side that is trying to protect women, and pharmacists that are trying to harm women.
I disagree that there is a distinction with a difference between a private employer setting the nature of their position and the government setting the nature of a state-certified position. In both cases, the person has the personal freedom to accept the job, or to reject it. CVS saying that employees must hand out all valid prescriptions upon pain of firing is no more or less an issue of personal freedom than a state’s licensing body saying the same exact thing.
A negative prohibition “you can not dispense without a valid prescription”, “you may not show up to work drunk”, is no more or less an issue of personal freedom than a positive requirement “you must dispense for all valid prescriptions”, “you must wear your name tag to work every day.”
I would argue that it is perfectly valid for a state licensing agency to determine what behaviors are prohibited, and what are required. As a teacher, for example, I must cleave to a code of professional ethics (mostly negative prohibitions) but I must also adhere to positive requirements. This is not an issue of personal freedom, it’s an issue of an offer of employment being contingent upon obeying the rules and policies which are part and parcel of that position.