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Case Study : My Summer Pharmacy Internship

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The case: During my summer pharmacy internship, a situation arose that there was a middle age male who carried a gun on his chest presented in my pharmacy, he was trying to buy some syringes and needles without prescription. The pharmacist on duty went up to talk to him. During the conversation, the pharmacist noticed that customer’s pupils were dilated, could not respond to pharmacist’s questions quickly, even mumbled to himself. Also the pharmacist saw bruises and some injection holes on both of his arms, so our pharmacist decided not to sell the syringes and needles to the customer and told the customer we didn 't have those products in stock at that moment since manufactures put those in back order and not sure when we could get them.…show more content…
On the other hand, if strictly control selling syringes and needles to drug users, pharmacy would then not be considered as a potential sources by drug users to get those products and its normal business would then not be affected. However, those addicts would then keep using or even sharing contaminated products due to the obstruction of getting them easily. The incidence of having life-threatening diseases like HIV will increasingly goes up not only just among drug users, but also among healthy people if they directly contact with infected drug users. Connecting concepts: Several professional principles we learned in class could be applied to this case, for example autonomy, beneficence, and non-maleficence. Autonomy: patient has right to decide what they want to do. A lot of state laws do not ban selling the syringes and needles without prescription, so most of the time pharmacists get to decide if they want to sell these products or not, however, this action greatly violates the principle of autonomy. Drug addicts have the rights to make their own choice in terms of living on drug free versus drug addictive lives, moreover, while addicts try to obtain sterile syringes and needles, it illustrates
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