I could literally type for an hour on this subject, but I am not about too. Allow me to give a student pharmacist's perspective (almost there to the full thing...).
First of all, druggist is a dated term, we're Pharmacists dammit
I, as a student pharmacist think any of my own personal morals and such go straight out the window when I am at work, and would definitely fill an Rx for 'the pill'. However, allow me to play the devils advocate here...
The number one rule of medicine I believe is to "do no harm" to the patient. Take now, for example a script written by a doctor that would obviosuly kill a person to the pharmacist, should the pharmacist fill that prescirption? According to many of you, it's all between the patient and doc and none of our buisness so we should. So it gets filled the patient takes it and dies, and now it's my ass as well. It's not always so clear cut.
Now, honestly I don't know about not giving the prescription back being theft or not. What if we get a script that's very blatently falsified? It's our job to confiscate the Rx immediatly and refuse to fill. Is that then theft?
Another situation. What if we have a known dirty doctor who is writing scripts for controlled substances for addicts? Is that a doctor patient relationship? I can tell you right now that if we didn't intervene in that, once again it's goodbye liscense and it's my ass going down with the rest.
Many of you have stated that the pharmacist doesn't know why she is taking this medication so she should not have refused to fill it. Well, we don't know that. The pharmacist may very well have asked. I noticed the lady who didn't get her birth control said it wasn't our job to regulate what people take. I'm going to disagree with that as well. The final prescribing is done by a physician generally yes, however pharmacists are constantly consulted on medications. It happens more in a hospital setting, but I can tell you at the pharmacy I work at, nurses and doctors constantly call me and consult with myself or a full pharmacist at the store to aid in a patient's drug therapies. With the ridiculous number of drugs out on the market now it is near impossible for Physicians to keep up, and in some medical schools that I know of, out of their 4 years (8 semesters), med students get a mere 1 semester of pharmacy. THis is all hearsay to me, so take it as you will. However, pharmacists are becoming an integral part of treatment and we're not just some guy behined the counter taking the pills out of the big bottle and putting them into the little bottle.
I reiterate once again, that I feel what this pharmacist did was wrong, but it's an extremely complicated world out there in this stuff, and it's hard to always be able to make the right decesion every time. This is why they make us get doctorates now.
So please, don't go to your local Walgreens and punch the pharmacist in the face. Feel free to burn down the Walgreens though, that company is bad for our profession
