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“You’re just putting a label on a bottle—why does that take more than five minutes?”

“If people go to McDonald’s, they are willing to wait to get a hamburger without pickles, but it’s not OK if they have to wait for the prescription,” agreed another pharmacist on the panel. “What we do is life and death—you can take your burger with pickles if you had to.”

Several pharmacists on the panel suggested the industry as a whole work on a public re-education program aimed at getting customer expectations in line with health prioritiesthrough mass public relations campaigns.

“You know the Wall Street Journal had an article recently that said that patient compliance had improved 30 percent because of specialty packaging,” one pharmacist noted of the growing use of blister packs to customize packaging to fit the needs of the patient. “That is such an important story in terms of impact on health care dollars—but all you see in the papers are stories about $4 generics. Why aren’t we blowing up those stories?”

One suggestion was to start earlier in life. “You’re not going to reverse 20 years of negative information and ignorance overnight,” noted one pharmacist. “Why not make pharmacy a part of the health education curriculum in grammar schools? If the kids were taking it home with them as a handout, or it was part of their homework, and mom and dad see it, too, you’re going to cover a lot of territory.”