Dispensary Corner

PHARMACISTS are often treated far worse than they deserve by customers, as one pharmacy employee in the English city of York recently discovered.

Methadone patient, Carla Graham, 43, had a reputation for behaving badly while collecting her prescription, often arriving drunk.

The situation became so inflamed her local Boots pharmacy arranged for her to collect her drugs from another store.

Under new legislation in the UK patients prescribed methadone can only get the drug from a nominated pharmacy, and they must take the drug under supervision in-store.

When a pharmacist told her of the new rules in May, Graham spat in her face - leading to a criminal charge.

During a court case the prosecutor said the pharmacist feared she may have been exposed to illness through the saliva that landed on her face.

Graham pleaded guilty to assault, but avoided jail time, after the magistrate heard of her hard work with a rehabilitation agency and her self-reformative probation service.

The court handed down a three-month suspended sentence.

Graham’s solicitor Keith Waterhouse explained his client “felt she was being ordered about a little bit like an animal rather than like a human being.”