By TERRY PUGH
After 48 years, Lorne Bitner is stepping away from filling prescriptions at the Dalmeny Buy ‘N Save Drug Mart.
The 74-year-old, who’s been a fixture at the store since opening the business with his older brother and another partner in 1978, has decided to retire.
Sort of.
“I’m actually still around the store, helping out during the transition,” said Bitner in an interview in early September at the home in Dalmeny he shares with his wife Ruth. “But now I’ll be able to take a whole week off instead of just a couple days here and there. In all those years, we’ve never had a real holiday.
“Even when I had a heart attack a couple years ago, I went in to the hospital on Thursday and was back at work on Saturday afternoon.”
Bitner has sold the business to Dr. Chantel Wutzke, who recently graduated with a pharmacy degree. The new owner is the daughter of Woody Wutzke, a long-time hockey coach in the community. Chantel grew up in Dalmeny and, like a lot of other young people, including Lorne and Ruth’s sons Kendall and Kelly, worked at the Dalmeny drug store while going to high school.
“I’m totally fine with her taking over,” said Bitner. “She’s going to be a great asset. One of the services she’ll be able to provide is doing rounds with the doctor at the seniors home in town, and helping determine the right meds for the individual residents. That’s right in her wheelhouse.”
The role of pharmacists has changed dramatically since Bitner first started working at a drug store in Saskatoon after graduating from high school in Biggar in 1968. He completed his university classes in 1973 and his thesis in 1975, graduating with a degree in pharmacy from the University of Saskatchewan.
“Back in the late 1960s and early 1970s, the pharmacist received the doctor’s prescription and filled it according to instructions,” said Bitner. “We couldn’t even put the name of the drug on the bottle. We couldn’t advise the patient on the drug unless the doctor specified. So the label had the patient’s name, the instructions on how it should be taken, and the doctor’s name. That was it. Very limited information. The patient often didn’t even have a good idea of what they were taking. It was ‘the little white pills and the little blue pills’.
“Patients nowadays can just go online and find out everything they want to know about a drug. But in those days it was totally the doctor’s decision.”
Bitner said about 1974 the province passed legislation mandating that the name of the drug had to be on the bottle.
“Pharmacists were just the facilitators providing the medication,” he said. “We weren’t seen as a source of education or secondary information. Now it’s advanced to the point where we’re just the complete opposite. Pharmacists are responsible now for ensuring the medication doesn’t interact with anything else they’re taking, and advising them of any circumstances they should be concerned about. If we spot something that isn’t right we’ve got to be back in contact with the doctors.”
Not only have pharmacists’ responsibilities increased, but so too has the range of medications.
“The number of drugs is probably triple what it was when I started,” said Bitner. “There have been improvements in drugs, and new classes of drugs that replaced some of the older, less-effective ones, with the object of eliminating side effects.
“A good example is insulin. Initially, the source was beef or pork extract; and then they came up with a way to clone the human insulin, so there was less potential for reactions to the beef or pork protein. And lately, there is another range of drugs, in addition to all the human insulins; there are drugs like Ozempic that you see advertised all over the place that help to reduce blood sugar and also provide benefits of weight reduction. They’re popular, and that’s a factor in why health plans are becoming so expensive.”
The changes in medication weren’t the only advances.
“Technology changed a lot over the years,” said Bitner. “In the early 1980s, when the province introduced the Saskatchewan prescription drug plan, we had to fill out cards, and there was only room for three prescription items on one card, so you had to fill out several cards if a patient had multiple prescriptions. It was a lot of paperwork. Added to that was using a typewriter for all the labels. Then in 1986 I got my first computer, and with that we could at least generate the data to mail to Regina. By the late 1980s we were sending that data in over the phone line using a modem. It was a big advance. Now we can go online to confidentially access the patients’ prescription profile, and whether they’ve had any lab work or been in hospital. We were blind to all that information before.”
Bitner followed in his older brother’s footsteps in choosing a career in pharmacy.
“The year I graduated from high school was the same year my older brother graduated from the College of Pharmacy,” said Bitner. “He was working at Westgate Drugs in Saskatoon, and he got me a job filling the coolers, cleaning the bathrooms and stocking shelves. After a while I started helping out in the dispensary. I liked it and I thought it would be a good career. I completed my classes, but it took me a while to get my degree because in those days you had to write a thesis. It was actually Ruth’s fault. We got married in 1972.”
In 1978, the prospect for a drug store opened up in Dalmeny; and Bitner, along with his older brother and another partner, started Dalmeny Drug Mart and Cafeteria.
“Before the little mall across the street opened, it was the only place in town to buy a cup of coffee,” said Bitner. “We sold sandwiches and ice cream and banana splits. The whole deal. Then when the restaurant opened up we just offered pie and coffee and then eventually phased it out altogether.”
Bitner bought out the other partners in 1980. At that time, a portion of the building housed a small doctor’s office, but over the years, the doctor’s visits became less frequent and eventually stopped altogether.
The building itself is one of the oldest on Dalmeny’s main business street. Ruth Bitner, a gifted writer who worked for many years at the Western Development Museum and has a special interest in local histories; said it was initially a Massey Harris farm equipment dealership. Later it was a shoe store, and its most recent stint before becoming a drug store was as a school classroom in the front part and the town shop in the back.
While everyone in town knew him as the town pharmacist, Bitner also served as a town councillor and mayor from 1988 to 1995.
“It was a good experience,” he said. “We got some things done that really needed to happen. The big one was the curbs and gutters. Up till that point, it was just a ‘side of the road ditch’ for drainage, and it was always a mess. The roads were narrow and mucky. So we got the curbs and gutters done, and all the streets were graded to the curb, so we had a good base; but one of the problems we ran into was dust, because all the streets were gravel. For a while we had a company from Prince Albert come and spray the streets with a byproduct from the pulp mill that bound the aggregates together to form a hardened surface, but it was getting more expensive every year to do that.
“Then, when they were re-doing Highway 16, at the time I was mayor, ASL Paving approached us and said they were reclaiming the asphalt from the highway. They offered to pave our streets with the recycled asphalt for a fraction of what regular asphalt would be. I think it was $5 a foot, compared to regular pavement which was $30 to $40 a foot at the time. The process was they peeled the top layer, ground it up and then mixed it with oil. We had just a very short window of time to get provincial approval to do this as a local improvement project, but we got approval from the residents and the province, and completed the project.
“The goal was to provide a dust-free surface and we were hoping it would last at least five years and possibly ten. When you drive around town today, that’s the same recycled pavement, thirty years later. It’s a bit rough, but it’s still doing the job.
“I was worried at the time because it was a big project. I was sticking my neck out, and I thought it might get cut off. But it turned out okay. At least people don’t have to dust their furniture as often. I guess I get some of the credit, or blame, for that.”
Bitner was also responsible for ‘The Bitner Rule’ – used extensively by the Dalmeny Dragons senior rec hockey team. Bitner played goal for the Dragons from 1978 to 2018, when he retired from active duty.
“The Dragons actually started in 1972, and I didn’t join until I arrived here in 1978,” said Bitner. “We tended to lose a lot of games, so one day somebody came up with the suggestion that if we lost by five goals, we’d count it as a tie. If we lost by four goals or less, it was a win. They called it the Bitner Rule for obvious reasons.
“But we had fun with it, because if we were down by six goals in the third period, the guys would really pick it up a notch and play harder than they did all game. The other teams would wonder what the heck we were so enthusiastic for, because we were down by six goals. Well, we wanted to cut that margin to five so we could walk out with a tie.”