Tuesday, November 09, 2004

Yet another reason last Tuesday was a disaster

This USA Today article (reposted on Yahoo) hits the idiocy of our society right on the head. A growing wave of fundamentalists behind pharmacy counters are outright refusing to fill prescriptions for drugs that they morally object to - most particularly birth control pills. And a growing number of states are trying to grant them legal protection when they do it. Some pharmacists have even refused to give the prescription back to the patient so they can fill it elsewhere.

To me, it's pretty simple. If you work at a pharmacy, and you refuse to dispense a drug that was legitimately prescribed by a doctor (and that is stocked by the pharmacy), you lose your license to be a pharmacist. Period. It is not the job of pharmacists to make moral decisions on behalf of patients and insert themselves into the doctor-patient relationship.

The only gray area I'd allow is if a pharmacist does not stock a drug, they are welcome to not order it - but they have to notify the patient that they do not offer that drug, so they can go elsewhere. If a pharmacist doesn't want to dispense birth control pills, they should work for a pharmacy that doesn't carry them. Or open their own. If you work at a pharmacy that stocks them, you dispense them. There's an association of these assclowns that actually has 1500 members, according to the article.

Congratulations, America. This is what you voted for last week. Maybe next week we'll bring back the burkha.

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