AP News, October 17th, 2007
The government appealed Wednesday for Dublin's pharmacists to resume distribution of methadone in a dispute that has threatened the outpatient treatment of more than 3,000 heroin addicts.
Health Minister Mary Harney, addressing parliament for the first time since 140 pharmacies stopped filling methadone prescriptions Monday, accused them of behaving unprofessionally and unethically.
But Harney resisted opposition demands for the government to mediate a solution. She argued that the government response — to distribute methadone from 13 hospitals and mobile clinics, and to provide heroin addicts a telephone line for information — was working.
Instead, she said, the government-appointed Competition Authority was investigating the drug stores and their leader, the Irish Pharmaceutical Union, for suspected cartel-style abuse of the market. She said the government was prepared in case the union, which represents 1,600 pharmacists, spread the protest to other parts of Ireland.
But the pharmacists insist their protest is the only way to confront the government-appointed Health Service Executive, which is planning a major reform of drug charges on state-funded services. The pharmacists say the new pricing system will require some members to distribute methadone and other drugs provided to welfare recipients at a loss.
Richard Hollis, one of the protesting pharmacists, vowed the protest would continue until the Health Service Executive agreed to direct negotiations. He called the government's referral of the identities of protesting pharmacists to the Competition Authority "the crudest form of intimidation."
Other pharmacists said their principal objection was the security risk posed by heroin addicts as weekly customers. They noted that the Health Service Executive hired extra security guards to oversee the emergency methadone distribution.
But the Health Service Executive, which is fighting a tide of red ink in Ireland's largely state-funded hospital system, rejects the pharmacists' complaints. The executive has already imposed a controversial hiring freeze and endured an eight-week nurses strike this year.
It says the reform of drug prices paid to drug wholesalers is necessary to save $140 million a year — and insists the changes will hit the wholesalers, not the retail pharmacists.
Harney said whatever point the pharmacists were trying to make was being lost by the fact they were jeopardizing the care of "some of our most vulnerable patients: recovering drug users who are stable enough to be treated in the community."
An opposition politician, Sen. Brendan Ryan of the left-wing Labour Party, said the government needed to broker talks immediately between the Health Service Executive and the Irish Pharmaceutical Union. He said some of the government's emergency methadone-distribution centers were too far from urban areas, and increased the risk that some patients would turn to heroin dealers for a quick, potentially deadly fix.
Ryan called for extra police to be deployed around the emergency clinics "to protect the patients against predatory drug pushers and other elements who may take the opportunity to prey upon the vulnerable."
Heroin addiction has been a menace in Ireland since the late 1970s. An estimated 15,000 heroin addicts live in Ireland, chiefly in Dublin, a city of 1.3 million. About half of them are not involved in methadone-treatment programs.
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On the Net:
Health Service Executive, http://www.hse.ie/en/
Irish Pharmaceutical Union, http://www.ipu.ie/
Dublin support group for drug addicts, http://www.mqi.ie/page.php?id19
