Posted on 11/08/2007 5:33:25 PM PST by llevrok
ASSOCIATED PRESS Published: November 8th, 2007 01:07 PM
A federal judge has suspended Washington’s requirement that pharmacists sell “morning-after” birth control pills. The injunction says pharmacists can refuse to sell the morning-after pill, referring a customer instead to a nearby source.
It’s part of a lawsuit by two pharmacists and a drugstore owner, who claim in a lawsuit that the state’s birth-control sales rules violated their civil rights.
The morning-after pill, sold as “Plan B,” can dramatically lower the risk of pregnancy if taken within 72 hours of unprotected sex. Some critics consider the pill tantamount to abortion, although it has no effect on women who are pregnant.
After listening to Fred on Russert's show, I think it would be hard to argue against your conclusion.
I guess we had better make sure we license any number of other jobs, then... After all, the free market and private certification can't handle this, in your book.
If I want to get meds from a pharmacist who is certified, then okay, I will. But if I take the same medicine I've taken for years, with no other changes, then it should be my right to be able to get it from another vendor.
I don't deny the training and experience of a pharmacist. I just think that I should be able to choose to opt-out, especially since I have had more luck checking things myself than relying on the pharmacy. Of course, the legal business has trashed the profession of a pharmacist--many now slap warnings on everything haphazardly, just to avoid liability, making it all rather worthless.
The only legitimate reason for the government involvement is for public health reasons, such as overuse of antibiotics. Otherwise, it's just more government intrusion and costs.
A good ruling if it stands for at least one appeal. The argument I’d use is that yes, abortion is legal, but you can’t force a doctor to perform an abortion. With the morning after pill, essentially abortion, the state shouldn’t be able to force any individual to assist in the procedure.
This may be a winning arguement in this case, but it may be a common argument. Does anyone know if it’s been used before?
That's coming under HillaryCare.
Distribution hubs have a service that takes as little as 6-12 hours to obtain most any drug.
I assumed in my post that most people would understand this. Pharmacies cannot carry all drugs as grocery stores do not carry all foods....but they sell them. You can actually buy a Mercedes from a Chevy dealer if you ask...........
So, you can only go to one pharmacist? Also, let's say a doctor prescribes oxycontin for a patient and the pharmacist suspects the patient is addicted. He can't refuse to fill the script in your world, right?
This is a excellent representation of the way populist ignorance of a subject can result in huge errors in judgment.
It might help you to understand that virtually all users of oxycontin develop drug dependencies that you would refer to improperly as addiction. If you had your way, pain medications for chronic conditions would not be sold because they cause what you call a addiction.
Unfortunately for those of us who have these conditions, we must deal with this crap on a daily basis. There is a difference between dependency and addiction. But the withdrawal symptoms are exactly the same. If pharmacists were the arbiter of such decision making, the patient would certainly find him or herself screwed by improper judgments made about their condition. This is why doctors make these calls. Not the retailer.
Pharmacies are expected to provide the drugs prescribed. If this breaks down in favor of personal judgment by pharmacists for so called ethical reasons, then the regulators will be forced to regulate.
What you will end up with, is a law that says they will sell the drug or be denied a State license. This will not help your cause, nor will it advance the effort to eliminate abortions from our society.
Pharmacies are not the place to advance social change efforts, and that should become clear. If not now, then later.
If the pharmacist with his license on a piece of driftwood had satisfied customers that I’ve spoken with, lines at the counter, and lower prices than the other guys do, then I could get used to checking out the broken beer bottle while my Rx was getting filled.
Not offhand--- though I think they ought to. I'll be interested to see whether anybody else answers your question. It should be a popular one with the Libertarian brethren and sistren.
Why would you vote against it? What's the problem with it?
That is, I don't see the difference, in principle, between regulating doctors this way and the WA regulation of pharmacies.
So a state government forces a person to commit murder...and you see no violation of basic constitutional rights?
Oh, but you can, according to at least one Freeper who opposes this ruling. See post 138.
You’re reading way too much into my post. I was responding to the poster’s moronic idea that the pahrmacist has no business (because he has no skill worth mentioning) being involved in dosing decisions. I hardly have a vision of all, most, or many oxycontin users as addicts, I just picked a drug that even the King of the World Octar the First could relate to.
Until beachcomber boy misses a drug interaction and you drop dead. Then you can be taken to the mortician. Since he would probably also be unlicensed in your world, you'll probably be embalmed with Gatorade.
The free market can solve almost all problems, but insuring that people in crucial professions where a single mistake can be a disaster are "ready to solo" is not one of them. Getting rid of licensing for "libertarian" reasons is just as silly as requiring ever profession to be licensed.
Pharmacists do indeed play a roll as a check and balance to the safe use of prescription drugs.
Unfortunately, they are not always privy to the patient medical history, and a judgment call on addiction or addictive behavior can be simply what it is, a withdrawal symptom because the patient ran out of a particular drug. This has happened to me and most chronic pain patients from what I can gather.
The pharmacy is just not a good place to control some social behavior. Pharmacists do not as a rule, have medical histories to make good judgments, and if they become a arbiter of what is right or wrong, we will have created unintended consequences.
This is why I thought the slippery slope comment made by someone earlier to be correct.
It's exactly the same public safety interest that causes the state to license doctors and nurses. The profession is such that a single mistake can be fatal for the patient. I can speak from experience on that; one time our daughter was prescribed a medication by our family doctor and then an ER doc prescribed another med for a different ailment, and our pharmacist caught a potentially lethal drug interaction.
To be fair, though, I am still struggling with the idea of life beginning at conception...I've offered thousands of prayers in hopes of an answer as to why God would find it in His will to create and discard so many babies. So many miscarriages occur without the mother even realizing she's pregnant...for what purpose?
You ask a tough question. I hope I can be an answer to your prayer. First, consider that when we talk about life beginning at conception, it's mainly in a scientific context. Granted, I'm sure most pro-lifers are thinking about a child with a soul when they use the term, the bottom line is that we don't know whether the zygote possesses a soul, we do know beyond doubt that it's the beginning of human life. Certainly, we shouldn't place ourselves in a position where science is pointing to something and saying "Human, without doubt" and our laws are saying "Kill it!"
That "they might not even have souls" may seem like a cop-out, but I wante to cover that before I get to the question of why miscarriages and such happen in the first place. That's not about God sitting in Heaven planning millions of unnecessary deaths, that's about original sin. The Universe is broken because of it. Nothing quite works, and that includes reproduction. As I understand it, most miscarriages occur because there is something grievously wrong with the child, and this is especially true with the early miscarriages we're discussing. It's just another sign that things are broken.
So we come to the bigger question, why does God let things go on like this? Why should there ever be suffering? Why doesn't He just use His power to fix it?
I addressed this when I gave a eulogy at my grandmother's funeral. Her name was Ginny Brown, and she had suffered dementia for some time before she died from complications of esophageal cancer. She was easily the sweetiest person I've ever known, and no one seemed to deserve a death like that less than she did. In one part of the eulogy, after reading most of 2 Corinthians 4 I said this:
Ginny Brown was a treasure, a treasure in a jar of clay. We watched that jar wear out over the course of her life as all of ours do. But the unseen was different. The unseen was being constantly renewed, being prepared for glory. Ginny passed away at 6:02 on Monday morning. It's not an exaggeration to say that she was a billions times better off at 6:03 than she was at 6:01. In fact, it's an understatement. On the surface it seems callous to refer to her period of suffering as "light and momentary," but it only seems that way because we can't see what was waiting for her. I've got a little glimpse for you, though, from Chapter 21 of Revelation:And I heard a loud voice from the throne saying, "Now the dwelling of God is with men, and he will live with them. They will be his people, and God himself will be with them and be their God. He will wipe every tear from their eyes. There will be no more death or mourning or crying or pain, for the old order of things has passed away." He who was seated on the throne said, "I am making everything new!"
The troubles are troubles, sometimes quite horrible troubles. But Paul called them "light and temporary" and said they "are achieving for us an eternal glory that far outweighs them all. So we fix our eyes not on what is seen, but on what is unseen. For what is seen is temporary, but what is unseen is eternal."
It may seem harsh, or flip, but this is the truth: All these pains, deaths, tragedies and injustices are like paying a one time $1 fee to access a bank account that has 100 quadrillion dollars in it. The problem is, we have to take that bank statement by faith. That's the problem for some folks, and I think the issue of suffering here on Earth is a source of thorns for a lot of people who would embrace the Gospel otherwise.
I hope I haven't wandered too far afield, and most of all, I hope I've helped. God bless you.
Sorry to hear about your problems with those meds, and there's no need for you to apologize. Have a good night.
And licensing boards: there's never any market distorting perversions going on in that body. Nope, no politics and no quotas that artificially limit the pool of licensed folks in order to affect wages
Are you also fond of the FDA on similar "protect me from making stupid and dangerous choices" grounds?
By the way, superb post in #154! Someone with a handy ping list (a list of the uplifting variety) should distribute that one. I'll remember this post when my mortician pumps me full of Propel...I wont give a damn.
Outside the feed, soft drinks, and kids treats that stock feed store shelves, should I be required to sell Saddles or Veterinary Supplies....milk and bread?
This argument may seem trivial and illogical, yet gubmint demands are rarely trivial and logical....right?
Good news. The shoppers can decide to support or abandon the pharmacist, but the government shouldn’t pull its license.
What I can say, though, is that I prefer liberty to federalism in those instances when a state has enacted legislation that limits freedoms.
[It’s part of a lawsuit by two pharmacists and a drugstore owner, who claim in a lawsuit that the state’s birth-control sales rules violated their civil rights.]
Judges like this give me hope that America may yet return to its good solid conservative Christian foundation.
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