The CVS drugstore near my office is clean, efficient, and can fill every imagniable personal need. It’s fucking amazing. I love it.
Unfortunately, it’s more of a magnet for crime than a two-dollar whore house.
I’m sure there is a ton of shoplifting — there’s beeping and security at every door. They even watch the middle-age white guys. Yeah, it’s creepy. If I was a racist, I’d say I now understand how “it feels to be profiled.” But I’m not going to say that — I’m not a fucking idiot.
There have been fights in the parking lot from the “neighbors” as they pick up whatever they need and bump into people they don’t like. The last scuffle I saw seemed to be over laundry detergent. At least that’s what they were using to hit each other over the head.
In the past 3 months there have been two armed robberies. What happened to robbing banks — don’t these assholes remember Willie Sutton (that’s where the money is)? I’ve looked in the tiller, that CVS can’t have more than $50 cash.
After the first robbery in July, the cop said, “They were going after the oxy.”
It’s a 100 degrees and these poor cops in full uniforms were taking turns dumpster-diving looking for the weapon. After an hour, they found it on the other side of the fence behind the dumpster.
I didn’t hear that conversation, but I imagine someone said –“why didn’t we look over the fucking fence first?”
I heard the robbers didn’t get any oxy, but a month later a dude shows up at CVS with a gun and tries it again. No idea if it was the same crack-head. They didn’t catch either of them.
Yeah, I know crack-head is not right, but it’s the only two-syllable description I could think of for “unfortunate victim of opiate addiction.”
Anyway, it never occured to me that if you need drugs, just rob the drug store. Those little pills are a lot lighter and easier to carry than cash. It’s probably easier to spend the pills in crack-head world than it would be to manage the paper.
Maybe the CVS and Walgreens are going to be the new banks. They are going to have to put a sleepy Barney Fife at the door with one bullet in his gun. If the robber does get away with a bag, blue shit will fly all over his hands and the pills…
So if you’re buying oxy off the street from a guy named Morpheus, don’t take the blue pill.
On second thought — especially for you men of a certain age– let’s just say it’s never a good idea to be taking little blue pills.
Anyway, let’s hope CVS is not the new target for armed robbers. It’s probably just the CVS near me that’s enjoying this little crime spree.
I originally wrote this story in 2019 about the CVS near my former office in Tucson. I’ve since left that job and hang out at home in the artificial world that is nearly crime-free in Gilbert Az. But there was something genuine about working where the homeless hang out. The low-income housing brought out some of the best fights in town, and strangers felt free to pull up in their trucks and have sex in the parking lot. Ahhhh. memories…
Now I’m wondering how to make change with drugs. Would ten oxys equal 1 baggie, or the other way around? Someone’s going to have to write an economics book on this.
It’s the unwritten rules of the street. Probably like these bikes in Seattle. https://www.seattlemet.com/articles/2014/10/1/this-is-what-happens-to-your-bike-after-its-stolen-october-2014.
So I guess if you want a bike cheap, buy it one part at a time. And from a stranger who you ask no questions of.
Trade oxy for bikes?
There’s probably an exchange rate for that.
I am really getting tired over all the fucking hype over opiates. The only one that I know (I’m a retired addiction therapist) that was a prescribed problem was oxycontin. The others posed few problems. That one, however, when refused a prescription, turned people to the street and there they encountered heroin (invented in the 19th century in Germany as a “less-addictive” painkiller than morphine because of its shorter half-life) which was soon mixed with phentenol. That last one, a synthetic from China, was 10x the strength and a real killer. Another problem narcotic is methamphetamines. I had a patient once that was ordered to treatment because he was selling it. I asked him if he had developed problems using. He said “Hello no, I’m not a moron. I just like my pot and was glad they didn’t find that. It would have been a decade in prison.” Go figure.
Now we have a new fad of a scandal: vaping. What the hell is that? I’ve seen, and even once used, e-cigs and hardly every saw a smoke screen come out. Yet we see it in TV with huge puffs. What’s THAT about. I’m glad Ive been retired for some time.
Thanks for the details. Retirement sounds like the impossible dream right now.
I had no choice, actually — I was of that age and the state closed the facility anyway.