Addicted to your health

I probably never would have noticed this post's Big Observation if I hadn't gone to Florida. See, there, last year, I had gone to Eckerd's drugstore, as one does, for some children's Tylenol and maps and Vitamin C. And I saw something for sale that stopped me for a split second because it was unfamiliar. Up near the front there was a little display of corncob pipes.

"That's odd," I thought. "Corncob pipes!" And then I thought "wow, even weirder, smoking paraphrenalia in a drugstore. Only in Florida!" Shaking my head, I turned to pay and noticed the entire wall of cigarettes behind the cash registers. The same wall I'd seen one million times before, oh, right, THAT wall.

Well. A few weeks ago I had occasion to take a stroll around a northeastern CVS to see just how well these drugstores are covering their bases.











•