Steve Anthony: True Canadian Pharmacy

A Calgary pharmacist sold thousands of painkiller pills, first to pay off a gambling debt and then after he was threatened by the buyer.
Bassam(Sam)Soufan, 36, was sentenced to an 18-month conditional sentence Wednesday to be served in the community for trafficking 16,000 OxyContin pills between February and October 2007.
OxyContin, a brand name of the drug oxycodone, is a time-release painkiller that has a similar effect to heroin, but is much !–more– cheaper.
Court heard Soufan met and befriended Ahman Hammoud at a casino in January 2007, when he incurred significant losses.
Hammoud lent Soufan $2,000 and was told he could repay the loan by providing him with OxyContin from the Scenic Acres IDA Pharmacy, where Soufan worked as manager.
Soufan initially provided 100 pills to Hammoud and was told he must keep doing it. Hammoud, a lawyer who has since been disbarred for unrelated activities and has left Canada, then supplied the drug to bikers, court heard.

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Pharmacist Jason Keeping is planning on having a minimal supply of OxyContin at his pharmacies after being hit twice by robbers in the last few months.
Keeping’s staff at Hanmer Medical Pharmacy was still reeling Thursday from being held up at gunpoint the day before. Keeping’s other operation, Lalonde Pharmacy in Capreol, was robbed May 5.
It’s just terrible, Keeping said. I’m sure it’s going to get worse. Every pharmacy seems to be at risk !–more– right now, especially smaller pharmacies.
Five pharmacies have been held up for OxyContin since early July in Greater Sudbury.
Aside from being a safety risk for Keeping and his staff, being robbed takes a financial toll. The pills are expensive and insurance doesn’t cover everything. It also creates a mountain of work.

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A Saanich pharmacist is being held in custody after police found a loaded handgun at his store Thursday afternoon.
Ali Laal, owner of Pharmaesthetics Inc. at 3960 Quadra St. and the People’s Pharmacy in Esquimalt, was originally arrested July 5 and charged with assault, assault causing bodily harm and careless use or storage of a firearm. The assault charges relate to incidents involving his wife and daughter.
Laal was released the next day on !–more– $1,000 bail and conditions to stay away from his alleged victims and a home on Excelsior Road in Saanich.
On Thursday, Saanich police executed a search warrant at the Quadra Street pharmacy and arrested Laal again, this time in connection with a 2008 investigation, said Sgt. John Price.
However, after the loaded handgun was discovered, the 50-year-old businessman was charged with possession of a loaded restricted firearm, possession of a firearm without a licence, breach of recognizance by having a firearm and possessing a firearm while prohibited by a court order.

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All he needed was two tablets to save his mother which would cost him more than Rs 2. But, Rafeeq Ahmed, had not bargained for the rude shock that life was waiting to throw back at him. On reaching the pharmacy, Rafeeq realised that he had forgotten to take his wallet.
As his need was urgent, Rafeeq requested the pharmacist
to give him the tablets and he would pay later, but the pharmacist refused to oblige.
A desperate Rafeeq tried to snatch !–more– the tablets and left his watch behind at the counter but the pharmacist caught him and beat him up leaving him with a fractured jaw.
Rafeeq had to shell out Rs 70,000 for his surgery and now wants to sue the pharmacist. He has filed a complaint with the Hennur police on Friday.

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I thought this was an interesting approach to pharmaceutical manufacturing that isn’t occurring in Canada, at least not yet.
Medicines used in Huddersfield Royal Infirmary now come from … Lindley!
The new Ј8m pharmacy at Acre Mill is now producing almost half a million tablets each year.
And it is capable of manufacturing medicines for individual patients or in large-scale batches.
The pharmacy is now making all the medicines needed in (more…)

It was a robbery with a big surprise for the robber. A gunman walked into a CVS drugstore expecting to hold up the place. What he didn’t expect was to find a pharmacist who had a gun and was not afraid to use it.
The shooting happened just after midnight at the CVS on Walton Way and 15th Street.
Investigators say this isn’t the first time CVS has been robbed, but this time was different. A pharmacist fired at the suspect, protecting himself and (more…)

Waterloo (Ont.) Record:
When pharmacist Phil Hudson came to Canada from England in 1986, the idea of a pharmacist customizing medications was a novel idea. Twenty years later, not only is his field fully accepted, but the British-trained Hudson was named compounding pharmacist of the year for 2008 by a company called Professional Compounding Centers of America, Canada.
The profession has come full circle. Early apothecaries mixed their own medications (more…)

A pharmacist who had worked a 10-hour shift without a break wept in court when it heard an elderly woman collapsed and later died after she gave her the wrong drugs.
The daughter of 72-year-old cancer sufferer Carmel Sheller was given a heart rate reducing drug by Elizabeth Lee, 30, who was working on the busy Tesco counter in Dedworth Road, Windsor.
She was in fact supposed to be collecting the steroid prednisolone for her mother who had been (more…)

“Pharm parties” where party-goers ingest random prescription drugs collected from family medicine cabinets without regard for potentially lethal drug interactions are a rapidly increasing trend among teens and young adults, a pharmacist told a town hall audience Monday in Carrollton, Ky.
Pharmacist Dave Sallengs likened the possible deadly consequences of mixing prescription medication to the death Jan. 22, 2008, of Academy Award-winning actor Heath (more…)

The pharmacist at TOP Food and Drug in suburban Edmonds seemed like an excellent employee.
Friendly and helpful to the customers, he even ran a collection drive, asking people to bring back any unused prescriptions so he could donate the medicine to Third World countries.
Instead, he put much of that medicine back in the pharmacy’s supply – even if its expiration date had passed – thus improving the store’s profits while masking that he was also (more…)