In the wake of this past week's excellent diary about Snyder Drug, a Great Falls, MT pharmacy that is now refusing to dispense birth control pills, I wondered whether the pharmacy was acting legally by refusing to fill the prescription.
You can read the whole backstory and the excellent comments here:
http://www.dailykos.com/...
For the response I got from the Montana Board of Pharmacy, follow me below the fold.
Here is the email that I got back from Bill Snyder, the compliance officer for the Montana Board of Pharmacy:
Hi [Chuy], I don't know that either of us has all the information regarding this question. My understanding is that Snyder Drug has made the decision to no longer stock in its inventory oral contraceptives of any type and has taken many measures to help accommodate client transition to other facilities. While one might be able to debate the merits of such a decision, we have searched and legal has determined
there is no state rule or regulation with regards to pharmacy practice that states a pharmacist/pharmacy has to carry a certain level of inventory, certain types of inventory or specific types of inventory for possible dispensing no matter what medical purpose the medication might serve. So I guess your question would be more does a pharmacy in Montana have to inventory all medications available and that answer is no, and that it violates no regulations by not carrying the product(s). I hope this information helps clarify what I understand to be the
situation. Thank you
Bill Sybrant RPh
Compliance Officer
Montana Board of Pharmacy
bsybrant@mt.gov
406-439-6015
As you can see here, the way that the Montana Board of Pharmacy is interpreting this move is as a business decision rather than one that intimately affects the health of a specific subgroup of the population, in a differential way.
As this tactic becomes more common--and I have no doubt that it will--I hope that we can find some way to work around this, either by making contraceptives widely available over the internet, or mounting legal challenges based on the differential impact of these supposed business decisions.