Thursday, November 11, 2004

Idiocy Files, entry 1

In other crazy news, this is ridiculous:

For a year, Julee Lacey stopped in a CVS pharmacy near her home in a Fort Worth suburb to get refills of her birth-control pills. Then one day last March, the pharmacist refused to fill Lacey's prescription because she did not believe in birth control.


"I was shocked," says Lacey, 33, who was not able to get her prescription until the next day and missed taking one of her pills. "Their job is not to regulate what people take or do. It's just to fill the prescription that was ordered by my physician."

Some pharmacists, however, disagree and refuse on moral grounds to fill prescriptions for contraceptives. And states from Rhode Island to Washington have proposed laws that would protect such decisions.


(...)

The American Pharmacists Association, with 50,000 members, has a policy that says druggists can refuse to fill prescriptions if they object on moral grounds, but they must make arrangements so a patient can still get the pills. Yet some pharmacists have refused to hand the prescription to another druggist to fill.

In Madison, Wis., a pharmacist faces possible disciplinary action by the state pharmacy board for refusing to transfer a woman's prescription for birth-control pills to another druggist or to give the slip back to her. He would not refill it because of his religious views.


??? Really, if a pharmacy has a policy where they won't fill prescriptions for moral grounds, then they better state it upfront (and for Pete's sake, not giving back the prescription or sending it elsewhere should get that idiot fired and his pharmacy license taken away).. But what it comes down to is, if you have some personal reasons for not dispensing certain drugs, then perhaps pharmacology was the wrong job for you. Not to mention that some people take birth control pills for reasons not related to sex and pregnancy and what happens if there is only one pharmacy in town and the pharmacist has qualms about cancer medicine, or insulin?

Via Radley Balko