Since November 2022, several pharmacies have closed across the Greater Boston area. CVS announced the closure of several stores inside of Targets between February and April, while Walgreens locations have simultaneously shut down across Mattapan, Hyde Park, and Lower Roxbury. These closures make accessing healthcare resources difficult, as the next closest pharmacy may be miles away. This phenomenon is known as a pharmacy desert.
After a fourth Walgreens location was set to close in Roxbury, many residents gathered to protest in a demonstration organized by Communities of Color for Health Equity. The event led to the location closure being postponed to the end of January; however, it was ultimately still closed, an outcome organizers and residents alike were dissatisfied with. In the House of Representatives on January 30th, local Representative Ayanna Pressley described the closure as “part of a larger trend of abandoning low income communities like the previous closures in Mattapan and Hyde Park…”
These closures follow a trend of over a thousand pharmacies across the country shutting down, primarily in communities of color. These pharmacies are owned by CVS, Walgreens, and Rite Aid, among others. A study conducted in 2022 published in the Journal of the American Pharmacists Association analyzing pharmacy deserts in Los Angeles, New York City, Houston, and Chicago found that of 670 neighborhoods categorized as pharmacy deserts, every single one except for 3 were in non-predominantly white neighborhoods.
The closure of the Roxbury location especially affects the elderly and those with disabilities. Combined with the other closures, there are few options for people with mobility challenges. “You have folks with physical challenges and folks living in senior housing, just a block away, who have relied on picking up their life-saving medication here,” said Danielle Williams, a customer of the Walgreens and leader of Prophetic Resistance Boston when speaking to GBH news.
The justification for closing specific stores varies somewhat between companies, but it generally focuses on financial prospects. CVS cited “local market dynamics, population shifts, a community’s store density, and other geographic access points to meet the needs of the community.” Walgreens described using the “existing footprint of stores, dynamics of the local market, and changes in the buying habits of our patients and customers” to decide which locations to close. Additionally, increased cases of theft have been used to justify closures, though Walgreens’ CFO James Kehoe later admitted to having exaggerated these claims.
Since the increase in store closures nationwide, efforts have been made to combat the growth of pharmacy deserts. Rite Aid has opened smaller-scale stores intentionally located in places that have less access to healthcare. Some companies have experimented with using vending machines that contain over-the-counter medications and other health products, while others have instituted mail order systems. While these efforts have done a lot to help serve communities with limited resources, local leaders have made it clear that ultimately the responsibility lies on the corporations themselves. “[T]here’s implicit bias, and many times there is institutional racism,” Reverend Miniard Culpepper said in an interview with GBH, “We’re talking about corporate greed here, profit over people.”
This article also appears in our print March 2024 edition.
