Anishinaabe pharmacy building self-confidence, knowledge, health, and healing

By PJ Wilson

M’CHIGEENG FIRST NATION – Sometimes, Neda Debassige Toeg forgets she’s at work.

Debassige Toeg, owner of Sweetgrass Pharmacy and Compounding in M’Chigeeng on Manitoulin Island, considers it home.

Her staff, clients and patients feel like family.

Sweetgrass Pharmacy and Compounding is unique. It is the first Indigenous-owned and operated pharmacy on a reserve in Canadian history, a labour of love for Debassige Toeg.

She is also the founder and president of the Aboriginal Pharmacists Association of Canada, and was the first Indigenous pharmacist “North of 60.”

“The whole thing is so cool,” Debassige Toeg, an Ojibwe from M’Chigeeng and a registered pharmacist for almost two decades, says. “All my mentors told me this would be impossible as a business. Independent pharmacies are a thing of the past.”

“To be an independent pharmacist is unheard of in Canada – especially in Ontario. It is difficult to go into a low-income community,” let alone run an independent business like hers.

“When I started looking at opening a pharmacy, every one of my mentors, my business advisers, said there was no way it would work. All the cards were against me.”

For one thing, the business officially opened its doors in July, 2020, just months into the COVID-19 pandemic when businesses of all stripes across the country were closing their doors and suffering through numerous restrictions.

“We wanted to create something unique,” she says of Sweetgrass. “We wanted to buck the stereotypes.”

So the first thing was making sure it didn’t look like a pharmacy.

“It’s almost like a boutique,” Debassige Toeg says. “We wanted to make it beautiful – warm, inviting, clean.”

There are chandeliers in the methadone bathroom, something to break the stereotype of addictions patients. There are epoxy marble vanities, and signs and posters with inspirational messages like “Be amazing today” and “You’re stronger than you think.”

Pharmacists – there have never been fewer than six working in the pharmacy – are not allowed to wear white coats while at work, something to help dispel “white coat fever” so many people suffer from.

Some of those staff members, she says, have gone back to school after getting a taste of life in a pharmacy, becoming pharmacist technicians and researchers.

“Actually, we do have an Elder here,” she admits. “She is the mother bear to everyone. She keeps everybody in line and respectful.”

She also points out that pharmacies are on the front line of health care.

“That’s where people go before they go to a doctor or a hospital,” she says, so there was more emphasis on making it a welcoming place and not just a business.

Debassige Toeg has worked in numerous pharmacies across the country during her career, and it was that experience that helped her make something unique.

“I took what I learned there and put it in here.”

You’re always able to see the pharmacist.

“We’re not hidden in the back,” she says. “We want to be accessible. We want to be able to be visible.”

In addition to carrying third-party tested Canadian products, the pharmacy is also a compounding centre, affiliated with the Professional Compounding Centers of America (PCCA). As such, it is able to produce specific medications such as pain creams.

“Because pain is so subjective, you can come in for consults and have something created specifically for you and walk out with a specific pain cream.”

All but the newest staff member, Debassige Toeg says, has attended compounding courses through the PCCA.

They also focus on helping clients live healthy, providing food diet, and lifestyle advice.

“We want to help in every way possible. We try to go above and beyond. We are building self-confidence, knowledge, health, and healing.”