Don't forget George on Desperate Housewives.

Don't forget all the nightly news shows that always show the blue Abbott
counting tray and the pharmacist counting 5,10,15,20 etc.Kind of like they
show a pianist's fingers as he plays the piano on tv.

If what you say is true -- I don't watch enough TV to recognize stereotypes
with great ease -- I would say it is because pharmacists have become kind of
a cross between trained chemists and puppets of the DEA and corporate
pharmaceutical companies. In the days of Opie and Andy, heck, even as late
as the early sixties chemistry textbooks used to suggest visiting your
friendly neighborhood pharmacy to fill in the holes in your chemistry set,
to order the compounds for making your own formulas at home, and for genuine
Dr. Pharm drugs compounded especially for a user's ills.

Nowadays they don't even sell chemistry sets anymore, maybe in part because
materials circulating on the Internet have shown how easy it is to make the
most potent toxins from ordinary chemicals that came in every young adult's
chemisty set (e.g., sodium ferrocyanide, just to name one), maybe in second
part because half the glassware and distillation equipment has become
illegal in many states. And the pharmacist is torn between serving the needs
of his customers at the expense of losing his/her license due to failure to
apply the laws of probability and to ponder the mystique of possibility
during every transaction, especially with any customer born in 1950 or later
(unless the person happens to look like they were born in 1940)(or unless
the customer and the pharmacists both sport similar tattoos or happen to
know each other from serving in Nam together). Many boomers are just waiting
for the day that the only pharmacists left are boomers themselves -- maybe
then they will all have more respect for each other.

I can't say this mess is totally the fault of thr pharmacist, I'm sure it's
not, but it could be in part -- who is better prepared to stand up to the
DEA besides members of the medical profession, pharmacists, and those whom
they have elected to serve in public office. The stereotyping is certainly
not the customer's fault, it is the fault of everyone who believes they know
what the customer needs better than the customer himself and his medical
attendants. People making the laws cannot possibly understand the needs of
every disparate customer, so the customer blames the pharmacist because the
pharmacist is the only link in the chain with whom the customer has any
dealings, especially when it comes to drugs that need to be signed for or
OTC's that be only be obtained by special order. Pharmacists use such
obviously contrived lines like, my distributor doesn't sell that one. Well,
duhhhhhhh, haven't they heard of Fisher Scientific? My dad used to order the
smallest quantities from them without any squabble. In the 60's when Linus
Pauling published his studies on Vitamin C, we used to purchase a kilo of
ascorbic acid at a time from Fisher and they never gave us one tenth of the
grief the modern pharmacist does.

End of rant

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