ST..JOHNS (CBC) - Access to illicit methadone could be curbed if a replacement program for narcotics experts was moved out of pharmacies and into clinics, a veteran St. John's pharmacist says.
Brian Healy says methadone which is given to people trying to solve addictions to powerful painkillers like OxyContin is winding up on the street because of how it's administered, through 48 different pharmacies around the province.
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Moreover, Healy, who does not dispense methadone, says pharmacists are usually too busy to provide the services that recovering addicts require.
"You have someone that has an addiction problem. Dumping them every day to a pharmacy and saying, 'Here you go, next' is not going to solve the problem," Healy told CBC News.
In most circumstances, participants in the methadone program are required to consume the drug in front of a pharmacist.
http://ca.topmodel.yahoo.com/s/cbc/110121/canada/canada_newfoundland_methadone_clinic_pharmacist121
Well how about that.
This pharmacist believes that reducing the ability of people to access their methadone will help them. His mind clearly operates at level where it produces concepts behind the ability of this common man to grasp.
Let's take this genius idea to it's logical conclusion and apply it to everyone else: We should have insulin clinics - those diabetics are always in danger of dying of something or other, I know. And how about a clinic for heart medications? Those people need monitoring, it isn't right to not give them the monitoring they need. Oxycontin? Why not make people line up for other opiates and narcotics? Let's do it for everything.
No.. this won't happen. This is the kind of thing we can only get away with when we do it to those people.
People can seriously consider making things difficult for those people and then go about doing it - it is not like the methadone addicted will protest and there aren't many people who'll take their side. Hell, there aren't even a few.
This frightens me to see. I know that when people find it acceptable to inconvenience one group of people because of a particular non-criminal aspect of that group, then it is not long before other groups are targeted.
That pharmacist could not have gotten away with saying that regular painkillers - the ones people go on methadone to get off- he's not saying people should be made to go to clinics for those. No, he wouldn't have been let off so lightly if he said that.
There are veterans of the Afghanistan war attending these clinics, single mothers trying to work a job and raise both kids, people just trying to get by with their handicap and people like this pharmacist want to make it even harder for them. That is shameful, and more so as it is under the guise of 'helping them'. The man even went so far as to equate attending a pharmacy to 'dumping' them.
Who knows, maybe the fellow is just bad with analogies.
So that is why I have decided I will do a Mitzvah. I have been speaking to methadone patients from around the city of London and I have been taken by their plight. They are more abused than any other class of person and they have no one to speak for them.
Certain racial/ethnic groups are associated with higher crimes rates, imagine restricting pharmacy access because of that. In essence that is what is being said about methadone patients, that they are more likely to engage in illegal activity in the form of methadone diversion. You can imply that about methadone patients, but just try saying it about some guy who eats several oxycontin tablets a day because of his bad back and watch what happens (*Hint: Your lawyer will be happy).
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