Governments will continue to unload services from doctors due to the bind they are in.

Mounties arrest pharmacist in alleged theft of prescription drugs

RCMP said an estimated 14,000 pills of the pain killer Dilaudid are believed to have disappeared from the pharmacy through the years.

Authorities are pursuing charges of fraud and illegal possession of a narcotic, but they cannot name the woman until charges are officially laid.

Investigators said they believe that the suspect also tampered with medication by removing 20% to 50% of the contents of some capsules before reassembling them and returning them to the shelf to be sold to customers.

Mounties said drug store officials began investigating the case upon reports from customers of the decreased efficacy of their medication.

When I think back on my days back in pharmacy school, one thought about the students I hung out with comes to mind: What a bunch of criminals. We did a staggering amount of drugs in school.

Pacifica's owner, Thang Q. "Frank" Tran, sold pain medications in large quantities. Particularly popular with his customers were high-dose, 80-milligram tablets of OxyContin. Tran filled nearly twice as many of those prescriptions as did nearby Walgreens, CVS and Sav-On pharmacies combined, according to state records.

Many of his customers traveled long distances and paid cash. Rovero drove more than 350 miles from Arizona State University in Tempe to get his prescriptions in Rowland Heights and then 33 more miles to the pharmacy....

Rogue pharmacists are key enablers of drug abuse and an important source of supply for the illegal market.

Although the majority of pharmacists do not abuse prescription drugs, research has demonstrated fairly substantial rates of at least occasional misuse of opiates and anxiolytics among pharmacists, and past studies have estimated that 18-21% of pharmacists have misused prescription drugs.

You miss the point completely, on the first point they should both be equally aware of the interactions and current medicines available to their patients, otherwise they are both being negligent. I covered this in the above post. What you fail to get is that the pharmacist has no idea of a patients medical history, history of compliance with medicines, past issues with drugs, family relationships that may or may not make taking medicines less or more risky. In other words a whole slew of dynamics and I havent even covered all the medical problems a person may be having unrelated to the medicines being prescribed or filled on that very day.

As far as prescribing, pharmacists are very much working for the company they represent which can and does promote its brand of pharmaceuticals.

Nothing makes sense without consultation with the physician, and is why walk in clinics are a joke and a product of lazy irresponsible governments

Doctors are (at least in the US) heavily lobbied/paid off by pharmaceutical companies, while pharmacists aren't.

Drug companies’ gifts to pharmacists probed by Ottawa

The federal government is investigating Canadian pharmacists who received millions of dollars in gifts and payments from major pharmaceutical companies in return for stocking their drugs.

The payments, denounced by a judge in one case as “kickbacks,” include money, prepaid credit cards, concert tickets and trips.

The Canada Revenue Agency is probing whether drugstore owners reported the gifts as income, and has taken nearly 20 drug companies to court to try to get records of the payments.

So far, the agency has flagged more than $18 million in unreported drug company gifts and payments.

The Canada Revenue Agency has launched a countrywide probe into millions of dollars' worth of incentives and allowances — including rebates, trips and concert tickets — paid by generic drug companies to pharmacies....

So-called professional allowances have been standard for years in Canada. Because multiple generic manufacturers are often producing identical drugs, they battle to get their products stocked on pharmacy shelves.

Incentives and payments are used to persuade pharmacists to choose one company's generic drug over others....

The list of possible incentives includes money transfers, preloaded credit cards, gift cards, concert tickets, trips and traveller's cheques.

It's not clear how much is currently paid in incentives to pharmacies. In 2009, the Ontario government reported generic manufacturers had paid $750 million in professional allowances to pharmacists. The province has since banned professional allowances.