Up to 15 pharmacies in the Dublin area were visited yesterday by the Competition Authority as part of its investigation into whether pharmacists who have withdrawn from providing methadone to recovering drug addicts are breaking the law.
Staff from the Competition Authority, accompanied by gardaí, served summonses on the pharmacists to appear before the Competition Authority's inquiry next week.
Richard Collis, a pharmacist in Phibsboro, Dublin, who was served with one of the summonses, said his premises wasn't searched by the Competition Authority staff but he regarded the summons as "a blatant act of intimidation" and said he would be taking legal advice.
Under competition law, the organised boycotting of schemes is regarded as being in breach of the Competition Act.
Up to 140 pharmacists have withdrawn this week from dispensing methadone to about 3,000 recovering drug addicts in protest at the decision of the HSE to cut the mark-up paid to wholesalers for drugs which are then dispensed by pharmacists under the medical card scheme. They claim this will make the dispensing of drugs by them to medical card holders a loss-making exercise. The pharmacists are also angry that the HSE will not discuss the fees they get paid with their representative body, the Irish Pharmaceutical Union (IPU).
The HSE, in a letter to pharmacists yesterday, said it accepted the remuneration structure for them was "unbalanced" and it was committed to addressing this. But it is not clear how it will do so as it claims to discuss fees with the IPU would be in breach of competition law.
Pharmacists argue they are not breaking competition law by withdrawing from the methadone scheme because they say they decided individually rather than collectively to do so.
Mr Collis added that the fee for dispensing methadone was set by the State.
"We do not compete among ourselves to take on these patients . . . there is no competition for services here," he said.
"I think this is unbelievable in 2007. My right to free speech, to associate and to be represented by a trade union is being curtailed for reasons that are spurious at best."
He said methadone patients had been provided with an alternative service at clinics set up by the HSE.
A spokesman for the IPU said about 15 pharmacies had summonses served on them yesterday. "We regard that as a very serious and worrying development and very unhelpful in the current situation," he said.
Meanwhile, the Pharmaceutical Society of Ireland (PSI), the regulatory body for the pharmacy profession, has warned all pharmacists to ensure in the context of the ongoing dispute that they are all familiar with the ethical obligations of the profession.
"We would remind pharmacists and pharmacy owners that they have a duty of care to patients and that if there are delays or complications in alternative sources of methadone being put in place, in the interim they have a duty of care to fulfil to patients," its registrar, Dr Ambrose McLoughlin, said.
Meanwhile, Taoiseach Bertie Ahern told the Dáil there was no justification for bringing recovering drug addicts into a dispute, irrespective of whether it was of a commercial or industrial relations nature.
The actions of the pharmacists who withdrew services to methadone patients was "totally wrong and the same applies to threats to withdraw from dispensing drugs to medical card holders", he said.
There were still no talks planned to try and resolve the dispute last night.