There used to be, or maybe there still is, a brand of pipe tobacco called Briggs. The motto on the can read, “When a feller needs a friend.” Brother, or sister, if you are on your way to a Doctor of Pharmacy degree or pharmacy technician license, or have just obtained one, we at the Pharmacy Alliance are telling you that you need a real friend in the profession. We believe very strongly that we are just that friend you need, because all of us are on a nasty collision course with reality. You’re going to need help!

On the one hand, pharmacy has never been at the zenith it is at now. Pharmacists tend to be in short supply, and the training required to become one has never been as competitive to obtain or as difficult to complete. Pharmacy is rapidly approaching medicine in rigor and in remuneration. Many of us who have been around for a while never dreamed we would be earning six figures, but we are. People from other disciplines are jumping ship and seeking to join our ranks. The demand for clinical drug consultants such as ourselves is increasing every day (in my own hospital, we now have a permanent cadre of infectious disease pharmacists who do more consulting than they do dispensing). We are a very hot topic, and, that being so, we should command respect.

The sad punch line is that when the rubber meets the road, we do not yet command respect! While the profession has soared to dizzying new heights, the job is something else entirely. Community pharmacy practice (the “drug store” environment) has not been redesigned in a hundred years. Despite your exquisite pharmacist training,(or, despte your considerable pre-technician training) your experience as a retail pharmacy staff member is going to be a disappointing and painful one. There you will stand (and, I mean, literally, for hours, without food and without a break), a new worker in a clean coat, spatula or counting machine at the ready, and at the opening gong of the day, you will be hit by a tsunami of prescriptions to fill, a strangling web of rules to follow (not all of which you will be able to), and a perpetually angry public that will do little else but use you as a whipping boy for all the problems in their lives. You pharmacists will be expecting opportunities to write pharmaceutical care plans and advise patients in a meaningful way, but most of what you will be doing with your time is swimming upstream in a hurricane of housekeeping tasks. It won’t be long before you will be filling prescriptions in your sleep after you get home from work. You will feel as if you are a slave on a Roman galley ship, manning an oar and rowing at ramming speed at the will of your employer hortators.

It seemed we were all alone at that oar. No pharmacy association represented us, felt our pain, or organized to help us in our daily professional struggle. Many of us tried to deal as best we could, with this huge disparity between the promise of pharmacy and what it really delivered, but in the fall of 2006, finally we had had enough. We formed The Pharmacy Alliance (TPA), the first group of pharmacy professionals (pharmacists and technicians) dedicated to preserving the Dignity, Self-respect, and Integrity we deserve. We had enough useless acronyms in our lives, but now we took those three vital components and called them DSI. What a beautiful sound!

You need us, and we need you! And, considering the daily state of affairs in pharmacy (you know just what we’re talking about if you’re reading this from your pharmacy computer), you ought to make the move right now and swell our ranks. Click our “Join TPA” link now! At long last, we “fellers have a friend” in pharmacy.

Paul Trusten, R.Ph.,
Secretary, TPA