Daniel McIsaac
Northern News Services

NNSL (Sep 06/99) - Helping Northerners cope with their aches and pains, allergies and sicknesses is a small team of professionals without whom we would all be feeling a lot less perky -- the territories' pharmacists.

With only about 20 pharmacists working in the Northwest Territories and another five in Nunavut, they're kept pretty busy, as a visit to your local drug store will surely reveal.

But Colleen Cowan, president of the NWT Pharmaceutical Association, said it's impossible to track the precise amounts of pills popped by Northerners. She said there's no central database and that the far-flung druggists tend to order their wares from a variety of southern suppliers.

Ken Dragon, association secretary-treasurer, added that Northern pharmacists also lack the political clout of their southern counterparts.

"Because there are so few of us up here," he said, "it's not like down south where they are able to help create a lot of laws and regulations -- and they have the money to be organized."

Dragon said association members generally meet once a year, in March, to discuss fees, store organization and individual concerns. But he said because it is the government that licenses pharmacies in the North, it is also the GNWT rather than the pharmacists that sets the rules covering, for example, which drugs can be sold over the counter.

Dragon said Northern pharmacies, therefore, have to wrestle over some decisions on their own, like the moral and financial implications of selling cigarettes alongside life-enhancing medication.

"Our pharmacy decided to stop selling cigarettes over a year ago," he said.

Dealing in drugs

Despite differences in regulation and population, pharmacists around the territories say dolling out drugs North of 60 is not so different from doing so south of it.

"It's pretty much the same business as in the south," said Mark Bleakney, the pharmacist at Rexall Drugs in Inuvik, "though probably the hardest part is the dealing with the isolation of the communities because of the distances between them."

But modern technology has succeeded in lessening those distances.

Chris Brooke at Valupharm Drugs in Iqaluit said serving the smaller communities is really no different from filling local prescriptions.

"The nurses who go out to the communities will just fax prescription orders on our internal system," he said, "and once we get the physician to authorize it, we send out the order."

Brooke said he began coming North almost 10 years ago when his friend Terry Fernandes asked him to help establish the Iqaluit pharmacy.

Brooke said the nature of his business in Parksville, on Vancouver Island, was slightly different from what he's experiencing in Nunavut.

"Parksville was more of a retirement community where the prescriptions were for maintenance of things like blood pressure," he said, "whereas here the doctors are dealing with more acute forms of trauma."

Inuvik Hospital pharmacist Nicole Joy says the nature of the job is what she expected coming up from the south.

"Certainly we have a lot of exposure to respiratory problems," she said, "but I don't know if that's just because the population here smokes more or because a lot of people have wood-burning stoves."

Joy said she also sees far more cases of botulism in the North -- generally contracted through eating muktuk. Still, she says that is easily treated with a botulism anti-toxin.

A resident of the NWT since 1996, Joy said that while pharmacists aren't as in demand as nurses currently are, she and her fellow University of Saskatchewan graduates had no trouble finding work in the North.