Night Pharmacies: Are We Going Back to the Bad Old Days?

By Raanan Geberer
Brooklyn Daily Eagle

BROOKLYN – Last weekend, on the way back home from somewhere at night, I decided to drop a prescription off at my local chain drugstore (which shall go nameless). I had done so a hundred times—since they opened, the pharmacy department itself has been open all night.

This time, however, when I entered the store, I saw a locked gate at the pharmacy department. And when I asked the clerk behind the counter, he directed me to a sign saying, “As of August 6, the pharmacy will be open from 8 a.m. to 10 p.m. on weekdays; on weekends it will be open from 9 a.m. to 6 p.m.”

This may not be a big deal for the average person, but it presents a problem for someone who takes five or six prescription medications regularly. Thank God my asthma hasn’t been serious for the last 12 years, but what if it was and getting the prescription quickly was the only alternative to going to the emergency room? Or what if I had just gotten out of the hospital and needed to fill a prescription right away?

I was in both of these situations in the early 1990s when I lived in the Kings Highway area and my asthma was still serious. In the case when I was let out of the emergency room and desperately needed to get a prescription filled to make sure I didn’t have another attack, I had to spend a lot of money on a cab to the nearest all-night pharmacy, in Kings Plaza.

At the time, I remember, there were one or two others well-known all-night drugstores. I remember the Neergard Pharmacy in Park Slope and a well-known one on the Upper East Side of Manhattan (where a physician friend of mine sent me, with a prescription, when I had an attack in Manhattan). There weren’t very many others.

I understand how large drug chains might want to cut back in this economy. I also know that they are leaving some outlets open with all-night pharmacy sections. But these may not be enough.

No one wants to go back to the days when every person with a serious illness had to memorize the names and locations of those few pharmacies where one can go to in the middle of the night in case of an emergency.