# Why are pharmacists so educated? **URL:** \ **Category:** Factual Questions\ **Created:** [April 1, 2004, 3:56pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/why-are-pharmacists-so-educated/237741 "2004-04-01T15:56:54Z")\ **Posts on this page:** 9\ **Page:** 3
**Author:** ![Kalt](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/k/b9e5f3/32.png) [@Kalt](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Kalt)\ **Post date:** [April 4, 2004, 12:24am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/why-are-pharmacists-so-educated/237741/41 "2004-04-04T00:24:52Z")
[http://jordan.fortwayne.com/ns/projects/pharmacy/pharm5.php](http://jordan.fortwayne.com/ns/projects/pharmacy/pharm5.php) that’s just one story on pharmacists stealing pills for their own use. dumb pharmacists will just take a handfull of pills from the jar and get caught. smart pharmacists will short a customer by a pill or two (described in my previous posts) and keep the extra for himself. Do a google groups (usenet) search for “pharmacist stealing pills” and you’ll get a lot of info about how widespread this actually is. ---
**Author:** ![MsRobyn](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/m/90ced4/32.png) [@MsRobyn](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/MsRobyn)\ **Post date:** [April 4, 2004, 1:41am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/why-are-pharmacists-so-educated/237741/42 "2004-04-04T01:41:31Z")
> [@Kalt](#): > > Pharmacists count pills, nothing more. The computer will handle all the drug interaction warnings. The catch is some of the pills that pharmacists count are things like Dilaudid, Oxycontin, and methamphetamine (Desoxyn). Substances with high recreational value, and a high street value. It takes a minimum of a few years of brainwashing to get a pill counter who will not snatch a few of said pills for him/herself to take or to sell. Pharmacists must believe “drugs are bad” much moreso than the average person. > > It’s like training a monkey to work at a banana stand and not take a banana every now and then. It takes years of training, or “education.” > > Even so, there are still plenty of pharmacists who do snatch a pill every now and then; usually by counting short and pocketing the difference, knowing if the customer bothers to count his pills it will be the druggy-customer’s word against the honorable well-trained pharmacist’s. Nothing personal, **Kalt** , but you haven’t been following the thread, or you’d know that pharmacists do a lot more than count pills. Robin ---
**Author:** ![Duck\_Duck\_Goose](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/d/50afbb/32.png) [@Duck\_Duck\_Goose](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Duck_Duck_Goose)\ **Post date:** [April 4, 2004, 3:03am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/why-are-pharmacists-so-educated/237741/43 "2004-04-04T03:03:06Z")
Kalt, when you assert something, and you’re asked for a cite to support your assertion, and you merely come back with a reiteration of your original assertion, that doesn’t count as a cite. You say, “It happens all the time”, I say, “Show me some proof”, and you say again, “It happens _all_ the time”–that’s not a cite, it’s an echo. This is a forum for facts, not for unproven assertions and sneering innuendos. Your assertion remains unproven, and remains firmly within the province of “sneering innuendo”. And, dunno where _you_ shop, but I just spent $90 on groceries this afternoon and it was only milk, OJ, Lactaid, four packages of hot dogs, toilet paper, Kotex, two boxes of Corn Chex, four boxes of dog biscuits, a loaf of French bread, and light bulbs–hardly a “week’s groceries”. That 80 bucks ain’t hardly gonna make it worth his while, let alone pay for groceries. If you’ve got a “good reason” to be a cynic about pharmacists, let’s hear it. Besides just a generalized misanthropy. > [@](#): > > \*\* I wouldn’t make up something like this.\*\* No, but apparently you _would_ go by hearsay that you’ve heard on that most reliable of sources, the Internet. :rolleyes: ---
**Author:** ![JRDelirious](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/jrdelirious/32/9531_2.png) [@JRDelirious](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/JRDelirious)\ **Post date:** [April 4, 2004, 3:08am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/why-are-pharmacists-so-educated/237741/44 "2004-04-04T03:08:20Z")
And apart from extensively ragging on an entire professional class, **Kalt** , do you have anything to bring to the until-then-ongoing discussion as to their academic requirements? Geez, relax, go punch whoever was the pharmacist who ticked you off so much, if it’ll make you feel better… Oh, we’ve all got some war stories, like the PharD at Mercy who we caught getting into the tincture of opium (opium, goodness, how _Goth_ can you get, now that I think of it). Of course, pharmacists don’t hold a candle to the anaesthesiologists. THOSE are the guys with the rilly good sh\*t 😉 But really, now. Hey, guess what, stock managers do insider trading! Accountants cook books! Lawyers sue for BS cases! Politicians lie! ---
**Author:** ![Duck\_Duck\_Goose](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/d/50afbb/32.png) [@Duck\_Duck\_Goose](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Duck_Duck_Goose)\ **Post date:** [April 4, 2004, 3:31am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/why-are-pharmacists-so-educated/237741/45 "2004-04-04T03:31:45Z")
> [@](#): > > **Do a google groups (usenet) search for “pharmacist stealing pills” and you’ll get a lot of info about how widespread this actually is.** I did. I just looked through 30 pages of Google hits for “pharmacist group:alt.support.chronic-pain”, which makes 300 messages, which went back to 1997. And I found exactly three (3) messages that referred to pharmacists stealing pills, one being, “I know this guy who says that this pharmacist got caught stealing pills”, and the other two being, “Oh, yeah, it goes on all the time”. So in the last seven years of alt.support.chronic-pain, there were three people who asserted that pharmacists are out there stealing pills from customers. That hardly qualifies as “it happens all the time”, or even “fairly widespread”. > [@](#): > > \*\* If you go onto a chronic pain message board and read the stories, you’ll see that this is fairly wide-spread.\*\* I would, except that all the chronic pain message boards that I’m finding on Google are either discontinued, or taken down, or want me to register before they’ll let me Search, or are giving me a “You are not authorized to view this page”. If you care to give me some links, since apparently you’re so familiar with them, I’ll be happy to go look. ---
**Author:** ![Kalt](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/k/b9e5f3/32.png) [@Kalt](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Kalt)\ **Post date:** [April 4, 2004, 6:50am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/why-are-pharmacists-so-educated/237741/46 "2004-04-04T06:50:34Z")
The acedemic requirements are to minimize the problem of pharmacists stealing highly desirable pills. Letting anyone off the street walk in and be a pill counter would lead to much, much higher rates of pill-fering. In addition to a college degree, pharmacists need to be trained to be actual “drug warriors” in a sense. I’m not knocking pharmacists. Nearly all pharmacists are good, honest people. I have absolutely nothing against pharmacists. But the high education and pharmacy degree (the answer to this thread) are requirements to minimize the theft of controlled substances from the pharmacy. Our system is set up so that doctors are the gatekeepers and pharmacists are the ones who actually unlock and push open the gate in regards to people legally acquiring opiates and opioids, amphetamines, barbiturates, benzodiazepines, etc. Pharmacists literally have their hands in bottles of dilaudid, oxycontin, xanax, vicodin, and even methamphetamine (Desoxyn) every day they’re on the job. A certain degree of education and brainwashing is necessary to guarantee a quality of people that will minimize the theft of such drugs. I’m not making this up. How anyone can doubt that this happens on a regular basis is extreme naiveté. I told you where to look and even provided a link to see that the crime of pharmacists pocketing pills happens and is somewhat widespread. It would be much more widespread if anyone, regardless of education, could walk in off the street and become a pharmacist. If I were a druggy, being a pharmacist would be my dream job. For the vast majority of pharmacists who are honest and wouldn’t dream of stealing a pill, I sincerely admire them. ---
**Author:** ![Pushkin](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/p/ee59a6/32.png) [@Pushkin](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Pushkin)\ **Post date:** [April 4, 2004, 1:25pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/why-are-pharmacists-so-educated/237741/47 "2004-04-04T13:25:24Z")
At my uni’ the Pharmacy course covers all of what other uni’s would call Pharmacology, which entitles you to work with the creation of drugs only. And I tried for Pharmacy myself but the chemistry content got to me before I even got my final grades at school :rolleyes: ---
**Author:** ![Duck\_Duck\_Goose](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/d/50afbb/32.png) [@Duck\_Duck\_Goose](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Duck_Duck_Goose)\ **Post date:** [April 4, 2004, 6:50pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/why-are-pharmacists-so-educated/237741/48 "2004-04-04T18:50:59Z")
> [@](#): > > \*\* I told you where to look and even provided a link to see that the crime of pharmacists pocketing pills happens and is somewhat widespread. > \*\* Erm…first of all, when asked for a cite, here at the Straight Dope Message Board, it is not considered sufficient to merely say, “I told you where to look, go find it yourself”. Second,I **did** go and look–I **didn’t** find it. It wasn’t there. The numerous accounts of “pharmacists pocketing pills from customers’ orders” that you said were on chronic pain message boards weren’t there. I found a chronic pain message board, I looked around, there were only 3 references, out of 300, to this happening, and they were all anecdotal. And third, your Fort Wayne _News-Sentinel_ link doesn’t address the issue under discussion at all. The issue is “pharmacist who steal a few pills **from customers** ”–your claim is that this goes on “all the time”. Your link, however, is dealing with “pharmacists who are themselves addicted and **who provide themselves with large quantities** of their chosen addictive substance **out of inventory** ”. These are two completely different things. We’re not talking about large-scale thefts. There are plenty of Google hits for pharmacists who got caught stealing in large quantities from **inventory**. I know about them. We’re talking about your assertion that there are “plenty of pharmacists” who pilfer single pills from customers’ filled orders, that it happens “all the time”. See? Two different things. It is _this_ assertion, that pharmacists everywhere routinely pocket customers’ pills, that I have yet to see the requested cite for. You said it was “fairly widespread” on chronic pain message boards; I went and looked at one. It wasn’t. And actually, your link proves **my** point, about forging prescriptions, which I attempted to make earlier and which apparently you didn’t “get”. I said: > [@](#): > > \*When you can make up a fake prescription for as many Oxycontins as you want, and nobody will ever know, why steal from customers? \* And you came back with: > [@](#): > > \*\*Pharmacists cannot prescribe or dispense controlled substances, especially Schedule II controlled substances like Oxycodone. In fact, I don’t know of any state that allows pharmacists to prescribe even legend drugs (prescription but not controlled substance, like clarinex or viagra). Doctors write prescriptions, not pharmacists. Even if they could, stealing from the customer by giving them n-1 pills out of a valid doctor’s prescripton for n pills and pocketing the extra pill is the only guaranteed way for a pharmacist to get away with it. The pharmacy must account to the DEA for EVERY controlled substance pill. \*\* Right. I **know** that only doctors can _legally_ write prescriptions. I **know** that the pharmacist must account to the DEA for every Schedule II pill. However, you’re **totally wrong** when you say that filching the occasional pill from a customer is the only way a pharmacist can get his hands on those drugs. I’m talking about **forging prescriptions** , Kalt. Not just stealing the pills out of inventory, but making up an entire fake prescription, filling it as per SOP, and then putting the prescription away in the filing cabinet just as if it were a legitimate prescription. I wanted to wait to address this point until I had had a chance to check with my daughter, to make sure I wasn’t missing something. My daughter confirms that, in the state of Illinois, at least, there is **no regulatory body** that comes into the pharmacy, say, once a month and examines all the prescriptions in the files to make sure they are in fact from real doctors. A pharmacist could quite easily make up his own **fake** prescription blanks, using PrintArtist and a papercutter, and then sign them himself in a suitably illegible doctor’s signature, “Hugh G. Rection, M.D.” or something like that, and then calmly fill the prescription, **pay for the pills himself** , file the prescription properly, and go on his merry way. The pills are accounted for to the DEA, they’re paid for, there’s no risk of an angry customer blowing the whistle on him for chronically shorting them on their Oxycontin. (And contrary to what you may think, the Powers That Be **do** take a serious view of accusations that a pharmacist is habitually shorting pills, _especially_ Schedule II pills. So it’s not necessarily the word of the “druggy-customer” against the “honorable well-trained pharmacist”.) The only risk would be that one of his pharmacy techs, or a disgruntled ex-wife, or the person he was selling the pills to (maybe his Drugs R Us connection decides to plea bargain, and throws him to the wolves), or giving the pills to (maybe his mother-in-law with chronic back pain Gets Religion and decides to do the honorable thing and confess), someone like that, would blow the whistle on him. But he can fill the “prescription” himself, without the techs knowing–pharmacist do fill prescriptions themselves, not everything goes through the techs. And my daughter points out that it’s precisely to slow down the rate at which dishonest pharmacists write their own fake prescriptions that in the state of Illinois at least they are not allowed to have a copy machine back in the pharmacy. So we can see that _this_ practice, at least–in contrast to your assertion that pharmacists steal pills from customers’ orders–must be widespread. It appears obvious to me like pharmacists who want Schedule II pills get them by forging prescriptions, or stealing them blatantly from inventory, **not** by pocketing them, one pill at a time, from customers’ orders. > [@](#): > > **If I were a druggy, being a pharmacist would be my dream job.** Right. And your link is addressing precisely this issue–pharmacists who are also druggies. But it says nothing about the practice of pharmacists filching pills from customers being “widespread”. And my daughter also wishes to point out that, depending on where he lived, a serious druggie wouldn’t be able to feed his habit by snitching the occasional Oxycontin from a customer. She says that at her pharmacy, here in a city of 86,000, they only have one or two calls for Oxycontin a week. And that if he were writing fake prescriptions for Oxycontin, if he got too greedy–wrote too many prescriptions in too short a period of time–he’d be spotted. The Powers That Be have a pretty good idea of how much Oxycontin usage is “average” or “normal” for a given geographical area. But if he lived in a large metropolitan area like Los Angeles, or in a place where a lot of elderly people with chronic pain lived, like Arizona or Florida, and if he were going to snitch single pills from customers, there would be more calls for Oxycontin, so he could conceivably feed his drug habit that way–but _why would he_, when it would be so easy to forge his own prescription? In L.A., Arizona, or Florida, he could write a lot more prescriptions, proportionately speaking. And if he didn’t get too greedy, he could get away with it, absolutely, because nobody’s ever going to come into his pharmacy and look at his files to see if they’re all “real” prescriptions. So, here’s my point, again. Why would a pharmacist who was already venal and dishonest enough to steal pills from customers waste his time with such a tedious process? Why wouldn’t he just forge his own prescriptions? He can get 100 Oxycontins at one fell swoop, he doesn’t have to wait for them to laboriously pile up over the course of a couple of months. And ya know, I’m having a LOT of trouble reconciling these statements: > [@](#): > > **I’m not knocking pharmacists…Nearly all pharmacists are good, honest people…the vast majority of pharmacists…are honest and wouldn’t dream of stealing a pill** And: > [@](#): > > \*\*How anyone can doubt that this happens on a regular basis is extreme naivete…the crime of pharmacists pocketing pills happens and is somewhat widespread. \*\* On the one hand, we’ve got, “Most pharmacists are honest.” And on the other hand we’ve got, “The pocketing of customers’ pills by pharmacists is regular and widespread.” So which is it? They can’t be “mostly honest” at the same time that there’s an epidemic of customer-pill-stealing going on. I’m not naive, Kalt, just being logical. Your assertion is not logical, and it seems to be not supported by the facts. And also, I’d like to point out that there’s a limit to the amount of “brainwashing” the state of Illinois can do to prevent a pharmacist from stealing pills. People tend to be honest, or dishonest, period, and they tend to have these values pretty much “set” by the time they’re about 12 years old. So the lengthy training process for pharmacists isn’t for any ethical “brainwashing”, because you can’t “brainwash” a thief out of his desire to steal. If people are gonna steal, they’re gonna steal, and no amount of training can train that out of them. ---
**Author:** ![paa3838](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/p/9de053/32.png) [@paa3838](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/paa3838)\ **Post date:** [April 5, 2004, 4:03pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/why-are-pharmacists-so-educated/237741/49 "2004-04-05T16:03:05Z")
The only way that education makes a pharmacist less likely to steal is because someone who has invested the time and tuition costs in getting the degree, as well as the effort to get licensed, is probably much less willing to risk a loss of livelihood over some tablets, even if they’re controlled substances. Since stealing drugs would be considered to be more serious than stealing, say, a pen, the pharmacist would be risking a fairly significant criminal record, as well as loss of license and career. [Previous page](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/why-are-pharmacists-so-educated/237741.md?page=2)