A PSA of sorts

You know what's good? What's good is when you have enough empenada dough left over for one more empenada, but not enough filling, so you roll up the dough with brown sugar and butter and nuts. That's good.

On to the serious stuff.

A poster over at LiveJournal has posted the experience of a friend of his whose prescription for Valtrex was refused, confiscated by the pharmacist, and not returned to her. I don't know whether or not it's a true story, and I don't think the LJ community would appreciate me linking to it, but you can check it out over at Pandagon.

If this should happen to you, here's what to do, in order:

1. Get the name of the pharmacist. The *full* name of the pharmacist. Make a note of it, along with the time that he or she was working, and the date.

2. Get the name of his or her superior, if he or she has one.

3. Get the name of the store manager for the pharmacy in question.

If anybody tries to block you at any point, make a fuss. Seriously. Refusing to fill a prescription might not be illegal in most states, but *confiscating* one is. Even if your prescription is returned to you, the pharmacist who refuses to fill it should face public scrutiny for his/her actions.

4. As soon as you get home, call the doc or clinic that prescribed the drug for you. If it's emergency contraception you need, go here to find a list of every-day oral contraceptives that can be used as EC, and their doses. Most doctor's offices will carry at least one of these brands in samples. Demand one.

The doc's office also needs to know the name of the pharmacy and pharmacist that refused your prescription, so that they can steer their patients away from them in the future.

5. Next, call the manager of the pharmacy/drugstore, or, if that person is not available, the consumer help-line for national chains. That can be found on the websites that the national chains run. Give the time, place, and date of the incident, as well as the names of the people involved. Be calm, but remind the person or people that you speak to that this is something that *will* be followed up on, and that *will* be acted upon.

Follow that up with both an email and a paper letter to the folks you've talked to. Keep copies of both. It's time-consuming, but worth it. If you get a response at any point, get names and phone numbers from everyone involved.

Most of the time, you'll get sufficient action from those first five steps to make you calmer, if not happier.

If you're still angry, or if the people you've dealt with up to this point have been a herd of bleating dickwads, do the following:

If there's a university within fifty miles of you, find out if they have a women's right's group. Or look online for the nearest chapter of the National Organization for Women or the ACLU. Call any or all of those folks and tell *them* (time, date, names, places) what happened to you and who you talked to. Ask them if they have any pointers about what you should do next. With luck, you'll get plenty of pointers, ammo, and hell--they might even stage a demonstration.

Then call your local paper. Even *my* local birdcage liner, as in-pocket as it is with the wingnuts, ran a front-page article on women being denied EC and OC at a local drugstore. Can't hurt to try.

All of this requires a lot of effort and that you become a spokesperson of sorts for Women For Whom The Condom Broke. That sucks; you ought to be able to get prescriptions for legal drugs filled with a minimum of hassle and wasted time.

Unfortunately, there is a small (but growing) cadre of people who work as pharmacists who believe that it is their right to make judgements about the people they serve, and judgements about whether or not those people ought to have one drug or another. The only way they'll ever do their jobs fairly--by either filling *every* prescription, or handing them off to someone who will--is if they're called out publicly on their bigotry.

Yes, it's bigotry to deny women oral contraceptives. It's bigotry to deny people with herpes drugs that reduce the frequency and severity of outbreaks on the grounds that they somehow deserve to suffer. You'll notice that all of these things have to do with *other people* making judgements on the validity of *your* sexuality, and that those judgements are necessarily on a case-by-case basis.

I was with a woman who was refused an EC scrip once. I wish I'd made more of a fuss over it; luckily, the wall-eyed bastard who refused the scrip later lost his job after doing the same thing to a rape victim.

Unless we want to have to go through some sort of pseudo-underground machinations *as women*, to get our health-care needs filled, we have to speak out.

Edited to add: Holy shit, lookee here. Seems some pharmacists are now refusing to dispense pain meds and psychotropics (like antidepressants). How far does this bullshit have to go before people start getting angry en masse?