Morals, my *rse

As anyone who knows me will tell you, getting annoyed is one of my favourite activities. I find getting annoyed a cleansing experience – a bit like having a good cry. (Provided the annoyance or crying is not about something that really matters to you, of course, in which case the experience is not so much cleansing as downright uncomfortable.)

I’m pleased to say that there isn’t exactly a world shortage of essentially unimportant issues for me to get annoyed about. Some of them have the added benefit of providing several sources of irritation at once. To my delight, in this week’s issue of The Yellow Scene, I found something just like that.

Here’s the beef. An employee of a local branch of Walgreens, the US drugstore and pharmacy giant, cites his “moral objection” to the use of emergency contraceptives (so called morning after pills) as a reason to refuse – with Walgreens’ blessing – to fill prescriptions for such products.

This is not a new issue, of course. The Walgreens employee in question is not the only pharmacist with a “moral objection” to doing his or her job. The predicament this puts patients in – especially in the case of emergency contraceptives – has sparked some debate in the US. As explained by this article in The Washington Post, there are pharmacists out there willing to go even further in their quest to hamper people’s legal rights to obtain prescribed medicines. On the other hand, there are also employers willing to stand up for those rights where Walgreens won’t.

Because, according to Walgreens spokesperson Michael Polzin (source here) “pharmacists can remove themselves from filling prescriptions that they have moral objections to. But we require them to either have another pharmacist at that store fill it, or, if another pharmacist is not on duty, contact store management, and the store manager will make arrangements for that prescription to be filled at another pharmacy before the patient leaves the store. The intent of Walgreen’s policy is to make sure that a patient doesn’t leave the store wondering where the prescription can get filled”.

Oh, well, that’s alright, then. Or is it? No, I don’t think it’s alright, and that’s the first of several sources of annoyance here. Walgreens is (in part) a pharmacy. In fact, it’s one of the biggest in the United States. Walgreens dominates the retail market for drugs and by its very presence makes it difficult for other pharmacies to survive - other pharmacies that may well have a different view of its customers’ importance. Walgreens makes enormous profits each year, and a considerable share of these profits are generated by filling doctors’ prescriptions. Amongst the prescriptions that Walgreens fills, and thus uses to line its shareholders’ pockets, are prescriptions for contraceptives.

What Mr Polzin is effectively saying here is that Walgreens relationship with its customers is one-sided. If Walgreens wants to do what it’s there for, it will. But if it doesn’t, then it won’t. It’ll simply tell the customer standing in one of its stores holding a valid prescription for a product stocked right there in that store to take her prescription elsewhere. Hey, they’ll even tell her where to take it, so she won’t be leaving the store “wondering”. Well, I sure hope I’ll never find myself in the position of having to take the morning after pill, but if I did, I might just be left wondering why I ever bought anything from Walgreens in the first place.

So this is my first gripe – that a giant corporation can be so arrogant towards its customers and get away with it. Why aren’t people in uproar, deserting Walgreens in hoards? Why don’t people have “moral objections” to handing over their hard earned cash to someone with so little respect for the people on whom they rely for their survival?

Well, I’d say it is because quite frankly, we’re not talking about customers in the usual sense. Not customers like you and me - dignified, upstanding citizens. No - we’re talking about some tramp who should have thought before she got herself into a mess! In other words, a customer you can afford to offend without taking any great risk. Far more risky, then, to offend the other side – the pro life lobby and its fringe supporters.

My second gripe lies with the “moral objection” itself, in other words with the individual who refuses to fill prescriptions on the grounds that he or she does not agree with the use of the prescribed drugs. In this context, I should first of all point out that I don’t have a problem with people objecting to the use of emergency contraceptives, contraceptives of any other kind, or any pharmaceutical products whatsoever. If I was given the opportunity to sit down to a mutually respectful discussion about it, I might be fairly vocal about the fact that I don’t share these opinions, but that is not the point here.

The point here is that we’re talking about people who have gladly accepted jobs as dispensing pharmacists. People who, just like Walgreens but on a scaled down level, have no problem with making money from selling drugs to people. As long as they’re not just any old drugs, but drugs that the individual in question personally approves of. As long as they can choose not to do their job, should the “wrong” customer happen to stop by.

Never mind that all the drugs we are talking about are legal. Never mind that licensed doctors have written the prescriptions. Never mind that the drugs in question are sitting right here, behind the counter in the store. And never mind that the wages that the employee happily accepts from the employer have come from revenue generated, in part, by the sale of these same drugs. Never mind any of those things. They aren’t important enough to persuade the holier-than-thou employee to reconsider his or her decision to work for the pharmacy in the first place. All you need to do to stay on that moral high horse is to turn your nose up at a prescription handed to you by one desperate, unfortunate woman whose individual actions you disapprove of. Well, give yourselves a pat on the back - that’s right big, hard and clever, as we say back home.

My third gripe – and I think it will be my last one for tonight although I’m sure I could think of more if I tried – is how toothless the law is on this matter. In fact, in some states, the law seems more concerned with protecting pharmacists’ right to keep their jobs and their moral high ground than with preserving the rights of Americans to obtain the prescription drugs they are entitled to. Taken to extreme, what this means is that what people may take and when they may take it is not decided by those authorities responsible for authorizing the prescription and sale of certain drugs, nor by the doctors licensed to prescribe those drugs. It is decided by the moral tyrants who defy the democratic process by which these decisions were made, and will do what they can to obstruct the rights of other citizens. And this, quite frankly, makes me more than a little annoyed. It makes me downright angry.