Virginia State Pharmacy Board v. Virginia Citizens Consumer Council, 425 U.S. 748 (1976), was a case in which the United States Supreme Court held that a state could not limit pharmacists’ right to provide information about prescription drug prices. This was an important case in determining the application of the First Amendment to commercial speech. Background The Commonwealth of Virginia had a statute which prohibited pharmacists from advertising prescription drug prices, providing that those who did would be guilty of “unprofessional conduct”. Drug prices varied throughout the state, as the District Court found. The law was challenged by an individual consumer and consumer groups, who brought suit in the United States District Court for the Eastern District of Virginia. Public Citizen's Litigation Group argued and won the case before the Supreme Court. Majority opinion Justice Blackmun, writing for the majority, began his opinion by giving a brief overview of the Virginia pharmacy regulation statutes, and then distinguished previous challenges to such regulations, explaining that such previous cases had been based on economic due process under the Fourteenth Amendment rather than on free speech grounds. Blackmun reasoned that this case concerned not only commercial regulation, but the free flow of information. This case was just as much about the consumers’ right to receive information as it was about the pharmacists’ right to provide it, and that the right to free speech is just as much about the “listener” as it is about the “speaker”. Blackmun further described how the court had whittled down the “commercial speech” exemption through past precedent; for example, Bigelow v. Virginia, in which the Court struck down a Virginia statute prohibiting the advertisement of out-of-state abortion procedures. He also distinguished commercial speech from such “unprotected” categories of speech such as “fighting words” and obscenity. Nor does having a purely economic interest in the content of speech deprive the speaker or listener of the protection of the First Amendment. This is especially true for the consumers in this case, as the poor, elderly, and infirm needed access to such information to make informed decisions about how to get their prescriptions filled inexpensively. For such people in need, Blackmun reasoned, such information was more than simply a convenience. Furthermore, he stressed the importance of price advertising in a free market economy, because they serve to provide the underlying information for citizens to make private economic decisions. The Commonwealth of