I will gladly pay you Tuesday for a Vicodin today

Just a couple comments on Tara's situation. Firstly, check that the pharmacist doesn't have a little Vicodin habit of his or her own. Probably not, but I've lost all faith in humanity.

Secondly, this situation is deplorable. If a veterinarian at an academic research facility intentionally withheld post-op painkillers from animal subjects larger than a rat-- especially a dog, cat, or monkey-- without a justifiable experimental purpose**, I have little doubt that said veterinarian just set in motion a series of events that would result in termination of his or her employment. I find it shameful that her relative had to go through this.

If you're ticked off too, read Terra Sigillata's excellent post on the responsibilities of a pharmacist.

**specifically, violating the experimental protocol of the principal investigator, and the animal welfare guidelines established and implemented by relevant oversight committees, e.g. IRB and ACUC.

More like this

As someone who has been associated with colleges of pharmacy as student or professor for 25 years, I feel compelled to weigh in on the debate raging in the US between a pharmacist's right of conscientious objection to filling certain prescriptions and their responsibilities as a licensed health…
As with yesterday's dialogue blocker (the question of whether animal research is necessary for scientific and medical advancement), today's impediment is another substantial disagreement about the facts. A productive dialogue requires some kind of common ground between its participants, including…
There are days when I imagine that I'll run out of news reports of scientists caught behaving badly to blog about. Then, I check my inbox. Today, my inbox featured a news item in The Scientist about two medical researchers caught fabricating data: Two researchers conducting animal studies on…
ScienceBlogling Dr. Isis has an interesting post about the ethical obligations of junior scientists regarding animal research. Dr. Isis asks two questions: Does a graduate student/postdoc have a moral imperative to report non-compliant research, even in the face of potentially risking one's…