Stormkveld

That's sick, what was it like living Antarctica in terms of social isolation, lack of warm weather and sun etc - was it easy to feel down / get depressed due to the conditions or are there steps everyone takes to combat that?

This is definitely a problem, but even outside of chain pharmacies the profession was falling apart because it's in a weird chasm between being a doctor and being a person who just labels up medicine. 90% of the job is mundane and requires no thought or training. It is the inaction of pharmacy groups to show pharmacists as high functioning professionals, and to upskill them, that resulted in this. It was then exacerbated by sweatshop style pharmacies rising up where the overqualified pharmacist will spend most of the day putting labels on bottles or helping unappreciative public members for free.

Not OP but it would be very difficult to do this from a retail pharmacy for anything good (decent opioids, ritalin and the like). Ordering and supply of S8 drugs is heavily regulated so you wouldn't get away with it for very long. You literally record, by the tablet, what goes in and out and that record can get checked against your physical stock during inspections and the like.

S4 drugs though, sure. In a high volume pharmacy, if some valium or codeine or testosterone goes missing people would barely blink an eye or even notice, though I never personally met anyone doing this, especially on a large scale, in my experience it would probably have not been difficult if I were so inclined and thought it worth the risk of job loss.

My guess would be either someone in the supply chain, or people who Rob/buy from people or forget scripts or work with doctors to forge scripts in order to obtain the products and resell them in a black market.

The AMA is an example of a professional body that actually does a good job. They purposely restrict spots for registrants, limit University places and protect the profession aggressively, which has maintained an extraordinarily high rate of doctor pay and generally very good conditions.

If the guild, PSA, PPA, SHPA etc. Put in even half of that effort pharmacists would have been better off. But they did too little too late to change the perception of pharmacists from "free medical advice" to "professional whom I should pay for their time and expertise"

When it comes down to it, these days, the job of retail pharmacist is superfluous. If it weren't for a handful of legal regulations it would be relatively easy to automate the entire job.

I always tell people to get the cheapest option. The name brands are a waste of money. A lot of the time the "cheap" brands are made by the same company anyway.