Pharmacists' Deeply Held Conviction... To Lie?

The Christian Right's push to ensure that pharmacists don't have to do their professional duty and fill all valid prescriptions seems to extend to the promotion of unethical conduct. In other words, they are willing to violate ethical principles in order to adhere to their consciences.

Dan Gransinger, a "Pharmacist and Pharmacy Manager" in Scottsdale, Arizona, offers this advice to pharmacists who are faced with prescriptions which they don't want to fill:

The pharmacist should just tell the patient that he is out of the medication and can order it, but it will take a week to get here. The patient will be forced to go to another pharmacy because she has to take these medicines within 72 hours for them to be effective. Problem solved.

So, pharmacists should lie to customers. This is a pharmacist and pharmacy manager advising that customers should be lied to. I don't know what pharmacy Dan Gransinger "manages," but I guarantee that if I lived in the area I would never use it. I don't see how you could possibly trust anything you hear there because the "manager" has publicly stated that customers should be lied to whenever it suits the pharmacist's "conscience."

A comment at Bush v. Choice notes that anyone following this advice would make one guilty of breaching the pharmacists' code of ethics and "interfering in the practice of medicine." I have to wonder if Dan Gransinger is himself guilty of a breach of ethics for giving the advice in the first place.

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