OPINION


THREATENING BEHAVIOUR


WITH PHARMACISTS UNDER GREATER THREAT OF PHYSICAL VIOLENCE THAN EVER BEFORE, TERRY MAGUIRE HIGHLIGHTS THE PREDICAMENT MANY OF YOU FIND YOURSELVES FACING ON AN INCREASINGLY DAILY BASIS. By Terry Maguire


H


is voice on the telephone was low and conciliatory. He claimed that there had been a


complete misunderstanding and that, while he had been ‘perhaps a bit cheeky’ with our pharmacist earlier in the week, he ‘hadn’t really meant it’.


It was the conditional ‘perhaps’ that raised my ire and I moved quickly from sympathy to assertion and a firm commitment to stand my ground. He was not ‘perhaps a bit cheeky’, I pointed out. He had issued an explicit threat to a pharmacist, who was only doing her job, and this, to me, was unacceptable. I could no longer provide him with a service.


But, he pleaded, he needed his weekly medicines; what was he going to do? I repeated verbally what I had written in my letter sent by recorded delivery earlier in the week. I had spoken to his GP and had the GP’s full support. He needed to discuss the issue with his GP as we had cancelled his weekly prescriptions after supplying two weeks out of four.


The man in question was a 40- something recluse, who lived close to the pharmacy, and had used us for


14 - PHARMACY IN FOCUS


years before disappearing about four years ago following a dispute over our failure to deliver his medicines on time. He had returned about six weeks ago - possibly following a breakdown in relations with another provider of pharmaceutical services. This time we made it clear that he would not be getting a delivery service and so a neighbour would call on Fridays to collect his weekly supply of mostly antipsychotics.


The recent dispute concerned diazepam. He telephoned asking why his diazepam had not been sent with his other medicines. The pharmacist tried to explain that she did not have a prescription for diazepam and it developed into a pantomime parody - ‘oh yes you do’, ‘oh no I don’t’ - until he suggested he would send someone down ‘to sort her out’, with the assertion that then she would be ‘really unable to do her job’.


Naturally, the pharmacist took this as a threat, truncated the conversation and reported it to me. She asked that I contact the police, which I did, and, having interviewed her, they unhelpfully suggested that these ‘druggies’ just make empty threats all the time.


Well, that may be, but she certainly had been severely impacted by this experience.


In the course of my investigations, which, through my duty of care to my staff I was required to do, I found that the patient had a weekly supply of diazepam in another pharmacy and a weekly supply of co-codamol 30/500 in a different pharmacy.


This information was supplied by the GP practice who were, it seems, quite happy to facilitate this complex supply web and possibly had no say in the matter as it was the patient’s wish.


They could not dictate, they explained, which pharmacy he used and for which medicine. The patient had clearly forgotten the complex code that identified which pharmacy on which day.


Angry as I was with him, I still felt sympathy. Michael Marmot, whose politics we could agree are on the left, has written widely of the consequences of social deprivation, and this patient is a classic example.


Marmot’s view is that the patient - because of his life circumstances - has


little control and therefore finds himself stuck in a cycle of addiction.


Jordon Peterson, a Canadian psychologist and author and whose politics we could agree are on the right, also discusses such patients, and describes how they end up self-loathing recluses ready to snap out at anyone who might seem authoritarian.


The patient is not a victim according to Peterson; rather he is the product of a long series of selfish decisions based on instant gratification, which have led him to a place of intolerable agony and from which he is unlikely to emerge.


In the UK, Marmot’s orthodoxy holds sway. Our system makes no attempt to challenge this patient’s behaviour, but simply medicalises it and facilitates him.


On finishing our telephone conversation, I was tempted to comment on the patient’s personal need for responsibility to get himself out of his victimhood, but I resisted doing so, since the left-leaning ideology is so ingrained that I risked being misrepresented as a punisher.


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