Drug Topics. The only magazine to tell it like it is. The Official TPA news source.

Drug Topics has stepped up and had the guts to publish essays by myself, David Stanley, Dennis Miller, Tom Hanson and number of other pharmacists who have a need to address the soul-crushing working conditions in the job of working in retail pharmacy.  Drug Topics magazine is, once again, the go-to news source for all pharmacists.  There was a tough patch when the old New Jersey editorial crew seemed to want to make the magazine just another clinical rag.  How many of us want to read another article about filiariasis in the Asian community of San Francisco when we can read about 14 hour shifts with only a giant Snickers bar, Cheetos and a big bag of Nutter Butter cookies washed down by multiple Mountain Dews?  Advanstar, the company that owns Drug Topics stacked the sand bags, sent editorial to North Olmsted, Ohio and started brand new.  The editorial staff was inexperienced, but eager to put out a quality new magazine for pharmacists.  They relied heavily on pharmacists for the opinion pieces that drive a magazine.  The people I mentioned above came through.  I commend the publisher and the editors for trusting pharmacists in the trenches.  Take advantage of Drug Topics.  Click on the red Drug Topics below.  Find the link to “Subscribe” and sign up for the magazine free of charge.  You can get the print or the Digital edition which is every word of the print edition.  This is YOUR magazine.   JP 6/6/2011

David Stanley will be a rock star in our industry.  He wrote this a few months ago, “You talkin’ for me?”, which was published by Drug Topics, by talking about a tale of two organizations. He could just as easily be talking about the dream world of pharmacy and the real world of pharmacy. On the one side, we find the pharmacy schools and the pharmacy organizations pushing their “dream world”. On the other side, there are only a few scattered organizations, a few blogging pharmacists, and the mass of working pharmacists. In David’s lattest article, “Understaffed and overwhelmed”, he takes us deeper into the “real” world of pharmacy. I don’t have to tell you what it is like in the real, working world of pharmacy. David gets right to the heart of the matter: understaffed and overwhelmed.

It is quite refreshing to finally see a pharmacy magazine talk about real world pharmacy, and I commend the folks at Drug Topics for taking on the less than glamorous side of pharmacy. The Pharmacy Alliance was born in April, 2008, by a group of pharmacists that saw the real world side of pharmacy. It was their contention that pharmacists should stand firm on their principles, and that pharmacists should be treated as professionals. You will have to look far and wide to find another pharmacy organization that promotes these things. Find me one pharmacy organization that talks about the real world of pharmacy as described by David Stanley. The simple fact is that all us pharmacists are finding ourselves facing more and more prescriptions to fill in a day. Despite the enormous responsibility of our job, most of us work in an almost circus like environment.