Pharmacists use addicts as leverage in dispute

THE action by the Irish Pharmacy Union (IPU) in declining methadone cover to addicts is yet another example of an impoverishment of attitudes towards those in need of help.

Addicts in Ireland are in the almost unique position of being both simultaneously the most despised and most vulnerable group of people in need of assistance from society.

That the IPU should throw their methadone clients into the political arena as leverage for whatever issues they may have with the Minister for Health is a contemptible acknowledgement of this implicit disdain, which moves us yet closer to a laissez faire model of social provision in which it is believed that only the strong survive and the rest deserve their plight.