I used to be a pharmacist at a popular pharmacy that has since shut down.
The owner was, technically, supposed to be a pharmacist too, but he had never studied pharmacy. He had simply bought the licence of an actual pharmacist and used it to run the business.
But he was kind… at least to me. And I loved him dearly. He never owed me, and he paid me well enough.
So why would that man go to jail because of me?
My boss was very diligent. He was barely around, and even when he was, he was always going from one store to another to restock.
He had three different branches of the pharmacy within the same area, but under different names. So, sometimes, customers would come to complain about a drug they had bought earlier that didn't work. They would then try the next pharmacy, not knowing that it still belonged to the same person, my boss.
A businessman par excellence, or so I thought.
One evening in November 2019 while I was on shift, some policemen came looking for him because a breastfeeding mother whose baby had died from liver cancer had reported the case to the police station. She said she only patronized our pharmacy for her drugs.
They didn't meet him, but they took me and locked up the pharmacy. I remember how I spent three days in that cell, swearing with my life that my boss was a good man and he couldn't possibly be selling fake drugs.
My boss had to take an urgent trip to the police station and before I knew it, I was released. He compensated me for this and even took me to the hospital for palliative care. So we returned to business as usual.
A few days later, a returning customer who came to buy a drug he was using to treat his hypertension needed help with verifying its authenticity. He had sent the scratched code to the attached number, but received no verification message minutes after waiting.
Normally, I would have simply assured customers that the drug was original and that there was probably a network glitch preventing them from getting the verification message but this time, I wanted to be sure.
So I kept trying and trying, and after he waited for 30 minutes without any feedback, he eventually left without buying the drug but I wasn't done…
I scratched every coating to reveal the pin on every drug that had it and sent SMS with different phone lines, yet nothing. The more I scratched, the more reality began to dawn on me. ..
