Dope fiends!

I have a couple of friends who are pharmacists, and I would not like to do that job. 

Under ideal conditions, it's still difficult. There are about a million drugs you have to know about -- the names (trade and generic), the prescribable uses, the off-label uses, the side effects, the doses, the dosing, the cost, the content, the special warnings for particular populations (pregnant women, kids, diabetics, and on and on) -- and about two million drug laws you have to know about -- the rules for dispensing, your responsibilities (and career-ruining culpabilities), the permissions needed, the requirements for dealing with doctors' offices, and on and on. Then add all the health insurance variations. It might drive you to drink -- and if it does, you'd better have teenage George Bailey working for you or you'll kill some kid by accident. 

And most pharmacists work under less than ideal conditions. Once upon a time a pharmacist might be a drugstore owner, running his own respectable business, a well-regarded figure in town. Now you're far more likely to be a cog in some corporate chain. And in some neighborhoods your CVS or Walgreens will be overrun with crime (especially if your town has a Soros-funded prosecutor); but in any neighborhood you'll probably have to deal with thugs and scammers and no-account losers trying to get at the sweet, sweet opioids in your drug safe. 

Maybe you work in a nice town with a functioning judiciary and constabulary, for a pharmacy that doesn't even stock the really hot stuff (our nearest supermarket has a pharmacy that warns in LARGE LETTERS that they do not dispense opioids). Well, you still have to deal with the public. And the public can be dumb. Also rude and really bad about taking their pills. The medical journals used to complain about patient compliance, meaning patients not following the instructions on their prescriptions, but the term "compliance" was thought to be too authoritative, too patriarchical. So now they call it "adherence," and it's totally different. Now the medical journals complain about patient adherence. 

And if even THAT is not enough to make you want to sample the drugs yourself, Joe Pharmacist, you're now expected to administer shots to the rubes who roll up, because the doctors' offices can't be bothered, or because your customers would rather die than go to the doctor for a routine physical. So you're stocked with vaccines for flu and COVID and shingles and tetanus and RSV and HPV and hepatitis and freaking monkeypox and yellow fever and everything else, and now you are poking around arms, and you don't even have an MD or a heroin addiction. 

It's an important job but maybe not a fun one. You may say "It beats diggin' ditches," but few ditches are dug by hand anymore. And if they are, remember: people pay good money for gym memberships to get that kind of exercise. Of course, they don't actually show up at the gym, but they pay for it. (Is that "gym compliance"? Or "gym adherence"? I give up.)