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Your friendly neighborhood pharmacist will soon be locked and loaded.
Rattled druggists from Long Island to the city are increasingly applying for gun permits following a spate of fatal robberies by armed thugs desperate to score highly addictive painkillers.
“I’m applying for a pistol permit because of this,’’ said Todd Svec, 48, a pharmacist and owner of the Arlo Drug store in Massapequa Park, LI. “I will feel safer if I have one.’’
Svec’s wife is also a pharmacist at the store — and his four daughters work there.
He pointed out that Charlie’s Family Pharmacy in Seaford, LI, where on New Year’s Eve a pill-popping ex-con attempted a stickup that left the thug and an off-duty federal agent dead “is just two miles from here.”
“That hit home. I know people there, [and] a tragedy happened there. If it happened here, I would feel some responsibility,’’ Svec said, adding that his customers tell him they’re also afraid of being caught up in a robbery.
The New Year’s Eve robbery — along with the Father’s Day massacre of four people during drug addict David Laffer’s robbery of a pharmacy in Medford, Suffolk County — has sparked a sharp rise in gun-permit applications in Nassau County and New York City, officials and experts said.
While Nassau cops didn’t provide hard numbers, officials said the applications were up sharply.
Amin Ladha, 62, who owns Midlawn Pharmacy in Seaford has applied for a gun permit.
“I hate guns, but there have been so many robberies and people have been killed,’’ said Ladha, who runs his store with his wife.
“It’s an epidemic. Every morning when I come to work, there is some fear that wasn’t there before.’’
And another Suffolk pharmacist said he’s getting a permit after years of refusing to do so.
“I never thought I would see the day when I would feel the need to take this step,” said the Babylon druggist who applied for a permit with the county.
“When you get five calls a day from people asking about OxyContin, you start to wonder which one of them is going to come into your store and cause a problem. It’s that bad now.”
Long Island authorities would not break down applications for pistol permits by profession, so it’s tough to determine exactly how many druggists are carrying guns or hoping to.
But overall applications have spiked for pistol carry permits submitted to cops in Nassau and Suffolk, where another deadly drugstore robbery took place last year.
Lawyers who specialize in each New York county’s convoluted gun permit laws said they saw a sharp uptick in applications from pharmacists since Laffer’s massacre.
Jerold E. Levine, a Long Island attorney who has been dubbed “The Gun Lawyer,” said he was flooded with calls from pharmacists after Laffer’s killings.
“I got about half a dozen calls from pharmacy owners. Several of them, from what I understand, did apply for a pistol permit,” Levine said.
And John Chambers, a Manhattan lawyer whose practice mostly involves gun cases, said he has a gun-carrying client who owns pharmacies in Manhattan and Brooklyn.
“In the months afterwards, if we would normally be getting, say, 12 calls on [carry permits], we were getting maybe 16 or 18 calls,” he said, adding that the calls came because of the pharmacy robberies.
Additional reporting by Selim Algar