In Which Our Author Takes a Very Long Time to Introduce His Latest Puns

Hello, the Internet! Now that I've decided to return to my blogge, I have so very many things to talk about. It's like that first time you eat dinner with your friend after going to or coming back from college. Both of you have changed enough that each is fascinating to the other. Then time passes, and you fall into a routine again, which is sometimes great.

The first thing I'm going to talk about is my disappointment regarding the stereotypes surrounding my newly-chosen profession. I say newly-chosen because the start of pharmacy school has invigorated my commitment to the practice. Where my professors used to treat me like I was one of 500 people who were probably going to fail, they treat me now like one of 159 future colleagues. I feel like I actually belong, and it's exciting and wonderful. Except for the aforementioned stereotypes.

You see, my friend Kelsey is studying anthropology. She is studying anthropology largely because she wants to be Indiana Jones. Technically speaking, I think Prof. Jones was an archaeologist, but he was also a boy and fictional, and I'm not going to hold any of those against Kelsey. But this got me thinking about phictional pharmaceutical (I'm not going to stop doing that) role models, and I realized that there aren't any. On the contrary, most memorable pharmacists in popular culture have been criminally negligent and generally creepy. Both are grounds for suspension.

The first one I thought of was the Apothecary in Romeo & Juliet, the one who sold Romeo that fateful dram (31.1g) of poison. Now, the play makes it clear that he sells the drugs reluctantly and only because he is dangerously poor, but I still don't think anyone can argue that he is a model of good practice. He doesn't even do a good job of counseling!

"Put this in any liquid thing you will, 
And drink it off; and, if you had the strength
Of twenty men, it would dispatch you straight."


Those are pretty vague directions. How many mL of liquid thing should he use? Are some liquid things better than others? Should he take it with meals? It's all pretty unclear. Plus, in any production I've seen, he is played as a pretty sketchy-looking dude. 

(Not Professional Dress)

The second phamous pharmacist (told you) that comes to mind is Mr. Gower from It's a Wonderful Life. He, like the apothecary, is a generally good guy who gets caught in a moment of weakness. A moment of weakness in which he compounds cold medicine from a bottle labeled POISON and then beats up a crippled kid. Now in any pharmacy I've ever worked in, we keep POISON pretty far from TYLENOL, but that may not be universal.

"Gee, Mr. Gower, you're pretty darn retarded."

But what's with this trend of pharmacists being miserable and pathetic? At 100 grand a year starting salary, I'm going to get over my son's death, not by drunkenly committing manslaughter, but by buying a boat. A really big boat.  I think these stories illustrate one reason for the pharmacist's high salary.  "Worse poison to men's souls" my ass. Poverty made the apothecary sell those mortal drugs. If he had half what I'm gonna have, he'd have told Romeo to rectally administer his forty ducats and btfu about his girlfriend. But I digress.


I am disturbed by the ease with which writers make a connection between "death by poisoning" and "pharmacists." Exterminators have poison too, and those guys are hella sketchy. Biochemists have tons of poison on hand, but no one writes meetings in a dark alley with a biochemist. Doctors and nurses are ten times more likely to kill you than pharmacists, but it seems that when a writer needs to poison some dude, he turns on his friends behind the counter. And I'm going to change that.


See I figure with my training in theater and pharmacy, I am uniquely suited to change the perception of pharmacists in artistic media. To that end, I plan on writing and producing a new television drama about a pharmacist who is also a sexy government agent protecting the nation from biological warfare with her unique knowledge of drug interactions and delivery routes.  The working title is "Over the Counterterrorism." I'm also planning a spin-off tentatively titled "Mortar-Fire and Pestle."

You can't see it, but her name-tag actually says, "Pharmacist: Dr. Anita Hardon."
I wish I was making that up.

Update:
A friend of mine in pharmacy school read my blog and sent me a message letting me know that she was actually working on a screenplay/novel very much like mine, only real.  I thought this was great, and I told my English major friend Melissa who went and said something super Englishy like, "It's interesting that people use fiction to take control of the way they are perceived," or something.  Anyway, I thought that was indeed pretty interesting, and I thought maybe you might too.