Weighing in at over 750 pages, Pharmacy Exposed is a massive indictment of a profession in crisis. Most people view the pharmacist's job as fairly straightforward, uneventful, and even boring. Doctors write prescriptions and pharmacists fill those prescriptions. What could be simpler? Too often, the reality is quite different. Due to competitive pressures in the marketplace, pharmacy has been transformed into a high-speed, high-stress, high-stakes enterprise in which powerful prescription drugs are just a blur on a hamburger assembly line. The big drugstore chains have embraced the McDonald's fast food model with disastrous consequences. I quit pharmacy after twenty-five years because I was so fed up with slinging out prescriptions as fast as my hands and feet would allow. I am trying to expose the fact that mistakes are far more common in drugstores than patients and physicians realize. Powerful prescription drugs are dispensed across America in a system that is guaranteed to produce errors. The big chain drugstores don't want you to know that pharmacies are purposely understaffed to increase productivity and profitability. A huge number of pharmacists are disillusioned with the profession and are not recommending pharmacy as a career for their children. A huge number of pharmacists say that they would never have chosen pharmacy as a career if they had known what conditions are like in what we sarcastically refer to as "McPharmacy." This is a reckless system that treats powerful and potentially deadly prescription drugs as if they were no different from any other consumer product in America. The big drugstore chains run their operations as if pharmacists were dispensing nothing more hazardous than a Big Mac at McDonald's or a Slurpee at 7-Eleven. Many pharmacists feel that the chains have made the cold calculation that it is more profitable to sling out prescriptions at lighting speed and pay customers harmed by mistakes than it is to provide adequate staffing so that mistakes are a rarity rather than a predictable occurrence. Understaffing sometimes forces pharmacists to take educated guesses rather than call doctors to clarify illegible prescriptions. Understaffing sometimes causes pharmacists to override potentially significant drug interactions rather than phone the doctor who prescribed the drugs. The chain drugstores' obsession with speed increases the occurrence of pharmacy mistakes. Pharmacists are under tremendous pressure to fill prescriptions at unsafe speeds. Drive-thru windows increase mistakes by creating the expectation among customers that prescriptions should be filled as quickly as McDonald's fills burger orders. It is a fact that the speed with which pharmacists fill prescriptions is one of the primary criteria used by chain management in determining whether pharmacists are doing a satisfactory job. Pharmacists go home at night crossing their fingers and wondering whether all the prescriptions they filled (and supervised techs in filling) that day were filled properly. They say to themselves something like, "Mrs. Jones was in today but I don't even remember checking her prescriptions." Pharmacists desperately hope that the public will be so enraged by the common occurrence of pharmacy mistakes that they (the public) demand that the chains provide adequate staffing for the safe filling of prescriptions. Pharmacists desperately hope that the public will demand that safe staffing levels be given priority over the bottom line. Understaffing increases pharmacy profitability but it also increases the frequency of serious pharmacy mistakes. Don't allow yourself to become a pharmacy statistic. Let chain management know that the current system is entirely unacceptable. I can state with certainty that the public has no idea how common pharmacy mistakes are today.