Actually junkie pharmacists. 
It would be easier to demonstrate than attempt to explain. The following text was written to accompany a slide which had two graphics: a picture of a chimpanzee holding a bong with the caption “The Party Animal,” and the graphic you’ve already seen with the caption “The Self-Medicator.”
Studies have identified two primary pathways through which pharmacy professionals become involved in substance abuse and criminal drug diversion. Although there is not a lot of literature available on this subject at this time, what is currently available is far too extensive for me to summarize completely. Criminologists who have interviewed drug abusing pharmacists have invariably identified two very consistent profiles of abuse. What is somewhat surprising is that the population of drug abusing pharmacists is almost exactly equally split in numbers between the two groups. The first group is composed of professionals who already have a demonstrated history of recreational drug abuse before entering the profession. This pattern of abuse frequently dates back to as early as high school, and in most cases starts no later than the abuser’s first or second year of college. These are people who are habitual recreational drug users, and who continue this pattern of behavior throughout their adult life. There is some disagreement among criminologists as to whether or not these individuals are attracted to pharmacy as a profession because of the relative ease through which it enables them to obtain substances of abuse. Although it seems intuitively obvious that this must be the case, and testimony from drug abusing pharmacists supports it, some criminologists contend that there is insufficient evidence at this time to demonstrate this conclusion. Interviews with these individuals demonstrates evidence of an intricate and well evolved subculture of drug abuse among pharmacy students and practicing pharmacists. The following is a transcript of an interview with a forty-nine-year-old pharmacist:
I began using prescription drugs to give myself the whole realm of healing experience—to control my body, to control the ups and the downs. I thought I could chemically feel, do, and think whatever I wanted to if I learned enough about these drugs and used them. Actually, I sat in classes with a couple of classmates where they would be going through a group of drugs, like, say, a certain class of muscle relaxants, skeletal muscle relaxants, and they would talk about the mechanism of pharmacology and then they would start mentioning different side effects, like drowsiness, sedation, and some patients report euphoria, and at a high enough dose hallucinations and everything. Well, hell, that got highlighted in yellow. And then that night, one of us would take some from the pharmacy, and then we would meet in a bar at 10:00 or in somebody’s house and we would do it together.
Other interviewees further described how drug abusing students would arrange to be in the same campus fraternities, thereby enabling them to protect each other from detection, and to ensure that an ample supply of drugs were freely and consistently available for consumption. Interestingly, all of the pharmacists who were interviewed indicated that there always existed a critical ‘abuse barrier’ beyond which drug use was no longer socially acceptable. They all indicated that these barriers existed both in pharmacy school and in professional practice. Once it got to the point where the abuse was no longer controllable, you were suddenly “on your own,” with your protective network no longer available.
The other group of drug abusers identified in the studies were not recreational users at all. These abusers were self-medicating themselves to treat specific pathologies, most commonly pain and anxiety. Narcotics and anxiolytics are by far the most highly abused category of drugs by these individuals. These pharmacists all started using drugs illegally after they became active practitioners. Without exception, abusers in this category all use a complex set of rationalizations to justify their behavior. They consider themselves to be first and foremost unparalleled experts on drugs and their metabolic effects. They invariably don’t feel the need to consult with an M.D. when deciding whether or not to avail themselves of pharmaceutical substances. In a sense, they view internists as mere technicians, who lack a solid academic understanding of the biochemical bases of the drugs’ actions. Doctors know ‘what these drugs do’, they tell themselves, but we know ‘how they do it’. An astounding 95% of all practicing R.Ph.'s in the United States have illegally self-medicated themselves at least once. Experts in the field of professional impairment invariably acknowledge that self-medication is an integral component of pharmacy culture. For all intents and purposes, it is universally condoned as long as it doesn’t devolve into rampant abuse.
Ultimately though, whenever either of these two patterns of abuse gets serious, they rarely if ever resolve themselves without considerable physical and professional harm to the abuser. Once the addiction starts to spiral out of control, abusers will go to any lengths necessary to obtain the substances to which they’ve addicted themselves. Here are some anecdotes from the GSU interviews. The first is from a 44-year-old pharmacist who was in charge of ordering narcotics at his pharmacy:
I was ordering excessive quantities and chasing down drug trucks. That’s what I used to do. I was really reaching my bottom. I would chase these delivery trucks down in the morning, because I didn’t come to my store until mid afternoon. I was in withdrawal in the morning, and I was without drugs, so I had to have it. I was just going nuts. Many mornings I had gone to work sweating. It would be 30 degrees, it would be January, and the clerk would say, “you look sick,” and I would say, “it’s the flu.” So I would pay the delivery guys extra money to deliver my drugs first, or I would chase the delivery trucks down in the morning. I knew the trucks delivered at 6 in the morning, they came by my area, and I would get up early and chase the trucks down the highway. I would go in excess of 100 miles an hour trying to catch up with this truck and flag it down.
This quote comes from a 39-year-old pharmacist who describes late stage, near-terminal stages of prescription drug dependence:
I was out of control for four years. I was just lucky that I never got caught. I don’t know how I didn’t get caught. I fell asleep twice coming home on Interstate 95. I fell asleep at the wheel doing 70 once, and then I scraped up the side of the car and blew out the tires. I also tried to kill myself with a shotgun. My wife was going to leave me. My world was falling apart, but I couldn’t do anything about it.
I posted it for review at a message board for pharmacy professionals, and got an overwhelmingly favorable response from every R.Ph who read it, except one. He simply didn’t accept that the “Party Animal” type of abuser constituted such a large percentage of all drug diverting pharmacists. He maintained that the problem always starts with pharmacists who “take a lorazepam here and there to deal with the stress,” and that the problem escalates from there. But the literature clearly supports what I wrote, and everybody who was familiar with the GSU studies agreed. Nobody else had a problem with the chimp or the Laocoon. They said the chimp wasn’t very flattering, but they all said they enjoyed seeing somebody tell it like it is. So I’m fine with it.
