The Cynical Career Counsellor Explains Your Future as a

Pharmacist

Pharmacist, huh? I bet while the other kids were playing doctor you were the girl handing out the tic-tacs like they were mommy's happy pills, right? How'd I know? Most kids wait until after they struggle through a year or two of premed and take pharmacology as the easy way out--anyone who sets their goals there in the first place must have a special place in their heart for chemical fixes.

So you'll do your degree at one of the many universities that offer the program, and either intern at a hospital pharmacy, in a corner drug store, or in the drug department of some major chain. Once you're done, you'll have to choose which of those venues will become your regular workplace, provided you do well enough and the job market is good enough for you to have a choice.

If you pick the hospital, you'll have a predictable salary and benefits. If you aren't ambitious, this is fine--not much room to advance there. You'll have to deal with the scary radioactive cancer therapy drugs, and you won't have the power to fire the sketchy assistants that pretend not to speak English when you notice narcotic tallies don't add up. (Their union is stronger than you can hope to overcome.)

If you choose the drugstore option, you'll probably have to start on the late night shift, and that's a sure formula for at least a couple of holdup experiences with strung out junkies.

Eventually you'll figure it out and go to work in the upscale pharmacy in the rich suburb. You'll be surprised by a few things there--you sell an amazing volume of infant formula due to the popularity of plastic surgery rendering many mothers unable to nurse, and the sales of certain, uhm, male blood flow stimulants will peak the same week that many of the wives head off to a golf tournament in the next town.

You'll be discrete, of course, and the pharmacist owner will reward you with a generous profit-sharing plan, and make no secret that he might be willing to sell you the whole business in a few years. He's done well, too--everything from herbal tonics to the blood pressure tester helps bring in more customers, and the rich don't mind paying a little more for the discretion of their local trusted pharmacist.

You'll be careful to follow your code of ethics strictly, at first, but over time you'll blur the moral line a bit. First it may be the friend of your daughter who's too scared to go to the clinic for a morning after pill, or maybe your husband's headache that needs something more than the over the counter medication, but like all in your line of work, you'll dip into your own stock. Once you cross that line, it's only a matter of time before you start medicating your own aches and pains with powerful opiates.

You take advantage of the owner's longer and longer vacations to set up an ingenious system of fake prescription pads and use the doctors' down at the methadone clinic as the most frequent fake signatories to your bogus prescriptions.

You might never have been caught, if it weren't for your boss deciding he needed a detailed audit of his business before selling it. He confronts you gently--he knows this is a problem common to the profession--and you agree to go to rehab. When you get out, he surprisingly offers you the whole business at a reasonable price--he knows the customers love you and appreciate your lack of curiousity about their disgusting personal matters.

Your husband agrees it's a great opportunity, and the two of you scrape together everything you can to make the deal. Soon you're paying down the debt ahead of schedule; the pharmacy is as profitable as you'd hoped. The only thing that disappoints you is the lack of perks you are entitled to. Sure, you get free samples of non-prescription drugs, and lots of bright drug posters, but the conferences in the Carribean are reserved for doctors--they write the precriptions. The most the drug companies offer you is a commission for every hemmorrhoid-fighting seat cushion you sell, and the occasional product fair at the Howard Johnson's 20 miles down the interstate.

It's a pleasant, though predictable life. Then one day, a doctor you've gotten to know calls you with a last minute offer of his place at a pharmaceutical conference at a luxury resort in Thailand. You are thrilled, and when you get there you are amazed at the decadence of the whole affair. It is unbridled bribery; people happily wear the drug company's logo on all manner of clothing, while you've hidden the few polo shirts they sent you after some angry customers asked "Didn't you see the evilness of drug companies in that Constant Gardener movie?"

On the third day of the conference there's a bit of a disturbance, and when you open your door to check, a wild-eyed man forces his way into your room. Before the security team finds him and drags him away, he babbles about his frightening discovery--that the main ingredient in the latest Parkinson's drug your host makes is derived from the glands of children snatched quietly from third-world streets.

You are questioned about what he told you, and wisely pretend to know nothing. Still, once you return home, you get the feeling you are being watched. You quietly begin researching the drug in question on the internet, and this is how they will catch you. Their strategy is simple but effective--they have two supposed DEA officers come to question you about several addicts who claim you illegally provided them with narcotics a few years earlier. It was during the worst part of your own addiction battles, and you realize it could be true. Then, tragically, a customer of yours dies when apparently the wrong medication is dispensed. You find the whole business suspicious, and your worst fears are confirmed when your assistant and a representative of the well known drug company (with an odd combination of consonants at the beginning of their name) explain that the drug charges and the potential wrongful death lawsuit will go away if you forget anything you might have heard about the Parkinsons drug.

You quickly agree, but after a couple of years, you slip up after a few drinks and tell the whole story to the assistant who replaced the one who had been working for the drug company. Little did you know that your trust was misplaced. Your brake failure will be branded a "tragic accident".