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Opening Arguments

More free enterprise

Anybody else have a problem with government ordering a business to stock a specific item?

A Massachusetts regulatory board voted on Tuesday to require Wal-Mart stores to stock morning-after contraceptives, two weeks after three women in the state sued Wal-Mart for refusing to fill orders for the pills.

Me, I think Burger King should sell cigarettes, and it annoys me no end that I can't get my asthma medication at the gas station. Who can I call?

Posted in: Current Affairs

Comments

Steve Towsley
Wed, 02/15/2006 - 5:12pm

You go to a gas station expecting to buy gas, and to a Burger King to buy burgers. That's the kind of businesses those are.

People go to pharmacies all across this country to fill prescriptions for pills, among other forms of medicine. Pharmacies are the ONLY places in America where prescription drugs can reliably be obtained in sufficient quantity to serve all Americans.

If pharmacies were permitted to ban certain prescription drugs, the prescribing doctors themselves would have to be permitted to dispense them. I wonder if druggists would like the competition. If you say that would be a conflict of interest, I might agree, BUT of course the same is true of the drug store that refuses to act like one.

And that is the point. Burger King is for burgers and druggists are for drugs. If druggists don't want to fill prescriptions, they should find another business. The nation requires full-service pharmacies, not third world quality hit-or-miss ones.

Letting druggists get away with this would be like letting air traffic controllers or other essential service personnel strike for as long as they want without losing their jobs. Reagan taught us that if controllers won't control, replace them with some who will, in the best interest of the nation. Same for the nation's pharmacies.

If pharmacists insist on acting like provincial pontificators rather than professionals, the feds should adjust the law so that such operations can no longer be licensed as pharmacies.

If such an unprofessional trend isn't nipped in the bud, we'd very likely see pharmacies banning other drugs they don't cotton to -- pain pills or diet pills or antidepressants or psychostimulants or medicine for AIDS -- just because of some private prejudice or liability paranoia or some corporate management's policy du jour.

A wise CEO used to say that if you're not merely paying lip service to Total Quality, if your company is actually striving every day to Delight Your Customers, to get as near to 100% customer satisfaction as you can -- your business is almost certainly alone and unique in its market.

I haven't seen anything in the years since to disprove that.

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