It is always a worry when drug manufacturers and pharmacists force themselves on decision-making bodies. Self interest rules both groups. Drug manufacturers want to increase sells and raise prices by "hook or by crook". Pharmacists want to hold onto their monopoly provided first by a piece of paper provided by a college and secondly by the government paymaster.
Pharmacists are like real estate agents - there is one on every street corner. In a competitive market this shouldn't be the case. Skills learned at university in chemistry is never used. Everything today is prepackaged. An unskilled person could do the job. They even want to do the work of doctors extending prescription repeats.
The Victorian Pharmaceutical Misuse Summit includes the Pharmaceutical Society of Australia. They want to bring in a medication monitoring system to reduce the number of drug overdoses. Being cynical, confiscation would be an ideal tact to increase sales. But aren't overdoses mainly taken by those intending to take their own lives? Surely, they are "barking up the wrong tree". More treatment facilities for mental illness are what is needed not medication controls.
We do not need another level of costly bureaucracy that clearly will not have any benefits. Obstructing patients from getting morphine based pain killers will only drive them into the illegal market. More regulation and policing of this "industry" has had not impact whatsoever over the years. In the US they have arrested so many drug dealing people it has become a nation of prisons, Do we want that here?
In Australia, GPs make a joke to patients when they have to phone up with the patient's details and get a prescription number in order to prescribe strong painkillers. Even doctors see it as an unwanted bureaucratic process. A doctor decides to write the prescription before he makes the phone call and the request is never turned down.
Health by Ty Buchanan
