Payback

I saw a story online this week that brought back a memory of an even funnier (and nastier) story, and I thought it was time I shared it with you. The original story comes to us from the local television station in Edmund, Oklahoma; it seems that a local pharmacist got tired of a serial burglar stealing painkillers and filled up a bunch of hydrocodone bottles with M & Ms. Sure enough, the thief broke in grabbed the bottles without looking, and ran off with them. The local police still have no suspects, which suggests an inside job (or possibly a police officer doing the stealing), but I was immediately struck by the fact that the pharmacist could easily have left something worse than chocolate candy in the purloined bottles…

While I was working in the drug store, my senior pharmacist told me a story about one day a few years earlier when a man walked up to the Pharmacy counter, pointed a gun at the doc, and demanded drugs. The pharmacist, a quick-thinking man, reached under the counter and handed the man a large bottle of pills, saying “Here, take these; they will really f**k you up!” The gunman opened the bottle, dumped all of the pills into his mouth, swallowed them, and ran out of the store without another word…

By this point I was staring at the doc in disbelief. “What kind of pills were they?” I asked.

He explained that they were a kind of super-laxative – something they give patients the night before abdominal surgery, to clean them out. There was no way to overdose on them, the doc told me; if you took too much the extras would just flush out of your system along with everything else. But even on a regular dose, they worked very quickly; he usually told his customers not to take these pills unless already at home or near an available toilet…

When the police were summoned, they found the gunman two blocks from the store, holding on tight to a telephone pole and trying desperately not to foul himself – a fight which he lost when one of the police officers tapped him on the shoulder. There was some delay while they found a tarp for him to sit on, so as to avoid getting the inside of their vehicle dirty. Fortunately, the pharmacist who told me the story was more than happy to loan them one from out of his trunk…

Now, given the recent trend of people suing companies when they manage to hurt themselves doing things no sane person would ever do (see yesterday’s post), it’s probably best if the pharmacist in Edmund doesn’t use this tactic; staking out the pharmacy and catching the thief in the act would leave him open to less legal liability, and installing a hidden camera would probably be safer. Still, I can’t help thinking that whoever the serial thief is, he’s pushing his luck – for all we know, the injured pharmacist might be reading this very post right now…