I was reading over at Fast Food Pharmacy about Big ‘N’ Tasty’s recent robbery and realized how fortunate I am to have never been in a situation like that. The closest that I have been to a robbery situation was back as in intern at a small-town pharmacy.

The pharmacy was a stand alone store in the middle of a parking lot with a physician’s office on the other side of the lot. The building had three entrances (a delivery door in the back, the front door, and an entrance directly in front of the pharmacy). There was an entrance to the pharmacy lab within 4 feet of the side door. The pharmacy owner had collected several pharmacy artifacts over the years, and they were displayed throughout the pharmacy. There were several of the old tin boxes stacked at the ends of several of the bays. That’s where we hid all of the brand name C-IIs.

One night in the middle of the summer, the alarm box on the side of the building was destroyed. The local police and the owner responded to the alarm. The pharmacy’s side door had pry marks on it, but the lock was intact. Since it was 4:00 AM, both the police and owner thought that it would be safe until the pharmacy opened at 9:00. They were wrong.

The burglars returned and cleaned the shelves of all the generic narcotics. But the brand name C-IIs remained safe. I guess this isn’t too big of a deal, except that in the tin boxes was a quart sized jar of pharmaceutical grade cocaine (used in a local oncologist’s cancer cocktail). I would hate to guess what the street value was because the jar was almost totally full. The also missed all of the narcotics that the physician next door stored in the cabinets under the pharmacy sink. I swear everybody that went to that doctor left with a shot of Demerol.