My BIL is a phamacist for a small, private pharmacy. He deals with false prescriptions and the like all the time. Because of the major trouble he could get in for distributing drugs on invalid prescriptions, he has to take extra care on validating a lot of what he does. And he has to have a pretty good nose for someone trying to scam him. It is a fairly common practice for him to deny someone on his suspicions. Also, he and other pharmacies have a pretty good network for preventing these scams. When one of them denies a scrip, they'll let others know about it and give a description of the person so that other pharmacists can be wary of them, too. It's a CYA thing and I don't blame them a bit. That may have happened to Estee's friend she mentioned.

That being said, I can't judge if the CVS pharmacist was right or wrong in his suspicions or his actions. For one thing, I don't think enough of his side of the story was reported to give us an idea what actions were made before the arrest. I'd be curious to see how closely what was reported is what actually happened and how much information got lost or distorted in a rush to report and print. Maybe the arresting officer was a little overzealous and at that point it was out of the pharmacist's hands.

This will probably become a media s***storm with calls for firings, policy overhauls, new regulations and all kinds of overhyped unneccessary crap when quite possibly all is needed (beyond any legal compensation to the woman involved) is a review of the reasoning and discernment skills of the pharmacist and/or the arresting officer.

Fear the reaper.
"The problem with socialism is that you eventually run out of other people's money." - Margaret Thatcher