CVS is the second largest chain of pharmacies in the US, and became famous (and lauded) in 2014, when the company decided, on grounds of public health, to stop selling cigarettes to the public. That was a good thing.
But there’s a bad thing, too, and one injurious to health. As reader Chris reports, the chain sells homeopathic “remedies.” As he noted in an email to me yesterday:
This morning when I woke up, my knee was killing me so I ran (or hobbled) over to the corner CVS to get some relief. I nearly bought a cream that was labeled unscented and then luckily noticed that it is also labeled homeopathic. The main inactive ingredient is alcohol and naturally the only active ingredient is so diluted it can only be found in trace amounts. One absolutely confounding review of the product claims it works and only has a slight smell of alcohol upon application, a smell that quickly dissipates. I wonder why this is the case!
I know you’ve posted about homeopathic remedies at places like Whole Foods that are more left-leaning and into the organic trend, but I was surprised to see this at CVS. I suppose I wouldn’t object to them selling these things (they’re free to sell whatever they please), but it is completely misleading to put these products in the medicine aisles. Not only does it give legitimacy to these products, it could mislead knowledgeable customers, something that almost happened to me this morning. To make things worse, the homeopathic remedy is more than double the price of actual medicine. They should be ashamed of themselves. I’m writing a letter to them to see if they have any explanation; I’m not holding my breath that their reply will have any substance, much like the woo they’re peddling.
To the left, real pain medicine. To the right, the woo in a box for 200-250% more.
Boiron Arnicare pain-relieving medicines are recommended by plastic surgeon Shirley Madhère, MD from New York, NY.
Boiron Arnicare pain-relieving medicines are recommended by Mark Youssef, MD, board-certified cosmetic surgeon at Younique Cosmetic Surgery Center in Santa Monica, Calif.
As a pharmacist who used to work for Walgreens, I learned that Walgreens will sell anything that can turn a profit. They’ll stock worthless “medical” products on the shelves as long as people buy them and will be the first to replace one worthless product that’s outlived its fame with a new worthless product that’s being promoted by someone (Dr. Oz, Oprah) whose opinion shouldn’t be valued.
Yeah, I noticed the same thing about the bookstore where I worked. Any worthless book as long as people, you know, wanted it.
There’s nothing wrong with selling it, but they shouldn’t pretend it’s medicine by putting in in the same place as the medicine. It should be clearly labelled, “This ‘remedy’ is meant for entertainment purposes only. This is not a medical treatment.”
😀
Like OP Chris, I have no problem with them stocking the products. I just wish they weren’t intermixed with the real medicine because that increases the chances I pick one up by accident. If a store wants to have a “homeopathic medicine” shelf area next to the cold medicine, that’s mostly fine by me. I don’t necessarily like that they’re selling useless junk, but now its just an issue of caveat emptor rather than confusing the customer by implying the two bottles sitting next to each other on the shelf do the same thing.
I don’t know. On principle shops should be allowed to sell what they want and people can decide for themselves if they want to spend their money on snake-oil or not.
But pharmacies have a certain level of implicit trust with the public. Some people will through no fault of their own assume that if a pharmacy sells a certain product, then they can trust that it works. It may not have occurred to them that a pharmacy is selling snake oil right alongside actual medicine.
I’m not sure that ‘implicit trust’ extends to other sections or marked shelves in the store. After all, they sell hair dye. Cigarettes. Cheap plastic toys. Does anyone have an ‘implicit trust’ that because CVS has chosen to sell this brand of hair dye, it will actually look the color and last as long as the box says? No. Being “in CVS” doesn’t really give the product any greater cache or trustiness.
So I think as long as they shelve it separately in a homeopathic section, they’ve done their minimal due diligence. In this case it would not bother me any more than CVS’ choice to sell cigarettes.
Many people are unaware of exactly what homeopathy is and the fact that what they are buying is completely useless. Several people I have spoken to were confused between herbal remedies and homeopathy. Even if homeopathic products are in a separate section, there will be people who will not know that they are purchasing snake oil.
Okay, let’s put it this way:
If you go to a hardware store to buy a tap, and you buy something that looks like a tap and has some sort of packaging that suggests that this is indeed the thing you want if you want an on/off valve to attach to water pipes; but when you get home you find that in fact it was fake tap that actually cannot be opened or shut, you would:
1. take the product back to the store and demand your money back
2. demand indignantly that they stop selling fraudulent products.
The fact that the aforementioned hardware store also sells cans of soda and horribly tacky lawn ornaments has zero bearing on whether it’s okay for them to be selling products that cannot possibly do the job they imply they can under the current laws of physics.
What did a plastic pink flamingo ever do to you? 🙂
Unlike your tap example, homeopathic product labeling doesn’t claim it contains effective dosages of active ingredients. They’re don’t for example put a label on that says ‘5% Acetominaphin,’ for example. That would be illegal and analogous to your tap example.
So, if your tap was labeled TAPP and was in the pink flamingo section instead of the plumbing section, and in small letters on the side of the box it said “contains no actual plumbing,” then yes, I’d probably be okay with the hardware store selling it.
Look, I’m not trying to prevent the Homer Simpsons of the world from buying a Sorny or Magnetbox. What I’m trying to prevent is the Sornys being located right next to the Sonys so that nobody grabs the fake thinking its the real thing.
The box says “pain relief” and there is no evidence it provides pain relief, nor any know mechanism (outside of the placebo effect) by which it could. It’s fraud, plain and simple, and it should not be tolerated. If you disagree then we might as well abolish the the FDA, SEC and a dozen other government agencies intended to stop con men from taking advantage of people. Just let people sell tap water to cure cancer and stock in companies that don’t exist.
The box is A) next to the regular medications and B) literally lists its “active” ingredient.
Both imply that the drug is efficacious. And the average consumer doesn’t understand what homeopathy is, so lack of clear labeling is material. If the clearly box said “Unproven herbal remedy made of 7% juice from flowering plant called leopard’s bane plus assorted chemicals” consumers would be less likely to buy it.
Pain is highly subjective and AIUI placebos “relieve” it in statistically meaningful samples of patients compared to giving them nothing. So its a placebo.
I’m on board with repealing DHSEA. The FDA should regulate supplements and homeopathics, they should have the budget they need so that they can test for both safety and efficacy, and things that don’t pass such future efficacious tests should be labeled as such (“produced no medical benefit beyond a placebo”). But even after this magical time which will never likely occur, I’m still going to be more concerned with accidental rather than intentional selection. Because let’s face it, even if the FDA regulated it and even if they required a label that says “contains no medicine. Will not reduce fever” or whatever, there will still be intentional users. And while education should fix that, shopowners are neither required nor qualified to be public educators and policy setters. Their responsibility begins and ends with helping to minimize accidental selection of a product due to their placement choices.
Look, Grania has her tap example, I’ll use one of my own. Mein Kampf is a nasty work of jingoistic, nationalistic anti-Semitism. If any book could be labeled ‘toxic’ based on the ideas it contains, it would be that one. I hope nobody ever reads it to absorb its philosophy (reading it for historical study, fine). But I don’t want it banned from libraries. I want it shelved properly. That includes not putting it in the young adult section. I want the only people who read it to be the ones who intentionally look for it, and not some 12-year-old browsing through the nonfiction stacks because he’s bored of vampire novels. You label and shelve it properly, and I’m good. Same thing with homeopathic “cures” in supermarkets.
Eric, it seems that you’re still missing the point (or just refusing to give up). Yes, if they labeled the homeopathic medicine as useless people might still buy it. I (and the others who’ve disagreed with your position) don’t have a problem with that. Nor do we think that it’s the job of a merchant to educate a customer. What we have a problem with is people being actively misled. If I am a shopkeeper and I sell a product called hair dye that is simply water, it is not a question of educating the customer or a case of people knowingly buying a product after full disclosure that it won’t work, it’s a matter of deceiving people. Do you really disagree? Do you not have a problem with someone selling water labeled as hair dye?
If you go to a hardware store in the US and ask for a tap, they’ll probably send you to the tool section instead of the plumbing section where the faucets are sold.
Then they’ll ask you if you wanna die. If you say yes, they’ll send you to the homeopathic medicine store next door.
lols
“Hose bib” will get you to the right place.
So JohnE, does that mean in your opinion the shopowner is required to verify the truthfulness of the product labels on all the products he/she sells? Or maybe they should remove items when a customer complains the label is untruthful? Somehow I think that latter sort of policy would be a pyrrhic victory at best – the good guys might win this particular battle, but we’d lose a lot more such battles than we’d win.
Both options are fairly ureasonable. Whether a label is illegally deceptive or not is the government’s call. As I’ve said, I’m on board with the FDA being given authority over health supplements, with the FDA being given greater funding for testing, and for negative FDA test results to lead to negative labeling. But that really isn’t going to happen any time soon. And as of right now, with the labeling regulations we have in place, most of these product toe the line rather than crossing it. You obviously disagree with where that line is placed. So be it. IMO the pragmatic way to best deal with this situation is to put homeopathic products in their own section, so that only intentional users get them rather than some innocent randomly picking up one because it happens to be next to the Tylenol.
The ridiculous part about this is cigarettes require conspicuous labeling on the package indicating the health risks. As Jerry points out, CVS still decided not to sell those, but there’s no regulations requiring any sort of conspicuous labeling on these homeopathic products. Notice the homeopathic label just kind of blends in with the colors at the bottom right. What actually tipped me off to look closer was the statement about it “working naturally with your body.” How else would something work?
John Oliver did a show about nutritional supplements a couple years ago. It’s basically the wild wild west when it comes to what companies can market so long as they stamp “Not FDA Approved” on it. It’s scary.
Funny, what Walgreen’s seems to have a great selection of is chocolate. Never seen so much chocolate anywhere.
Yes, pretty good prices on that chocolate too.
Walgreens also has this exact product: homeopathic Arnicare, as does Target.
Just from the video thumbnail, it looks as if Dr. Madhère has been hitting the botox. Undiluted, of course.
Looks to me like the studio assistant just goosed her.
🙂
cr
It’s not just that there are only trace amounts of the active ingredient, it’s that the preparation is so dilute that there is no chance that any of the active ingredient is present.
For example a 100C dilution is equivalent to diluting a teaspoon of sugar in the equivalent of a sphere of water roughly 30 billion light years in diameter and saying that the resulting preparation can treat a diabetic. The water is somehow supposed to remember what was dissolved in it, which violates the laws of thermodynamics.
This stuff needs to be regulated out of existence. Quickly.
“True” homeopathic medicine is at least harmless. What I worry much more about is the fact that QC on these companies is essentially nonexistent and people could be getting a lot more biologically active ingredients than is in actual medicine. I believe a few years ago several people lost their sense of smell/taste because they took a ‘homeopathic’ zinc-based medicine that in reality had huge, FDA-defying amounts of zinc in it.
True. But harm occurs when people forego medicines that have been shown by medical research to have some efficacy in favor of homeopathic medicines. I don’t think that “buyer beware” is ethically acceptable.
Whether or not the marketers of homeopathic, and similar, medicines really believe the stuff works or not isn’t really relevant when they use every dirty trick from the carny play book they can get away with to sell the stuff.
As I’ve said elsewhere (and did not originate): There is:
1. Medicine (proved to be safe and effective)
2. Not-medicine (not proved to be safe and effective or proved to not be safe and/or effective)
That’s it.
Well, there is:
3. Placebo effect; especially for those psychosomatic illnesses or the ones that go away in a couple of days anyway.
Yes; but it’s not medicine, it’s psychology.
I think the real problem is that the active ingredient isn’t active.
“The water is somehow supposed to remember what was dissolved in it…”
Reminds me of some of the lyrics from Tim Minchin’s Storm:
The whole song is great, if you haven’t heard it yet. I’d link to it, but I don’t want to accidentally embed a YouTube video.
Allow me (he says with great confidence)
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LkJEp2TbFHA
cr
(You cuts off the ‘https://’ when inserting the URL and WP automagically puts it back instead of imbedding the video)
Please see http://www.quackwatch.com
full disclosure: my dad 🙂
Thumbs up.
Quackwatch led the way in terms of advocacy for skeptical science based medicine, before science blogs were a thing. And at substantial personal cost. Quacks don’t like being called out, and, since Quackery can be quite profitable, can often afford to file expensive SLAPP suits to shut critics down, or even bankrupt them, even for making true statements of fact and statement of protected opinion.
I am not surprised, but what does surprise me is that one could buy this snake oil accidentally since it appears to be shelved with the real meds. If they are going to sell this crap (and they probably will, ignoring the pressure) they should at least group them on a separate shelf and clearly indicate that that is what it is. It is very deceptive the way it is now, and I can see a customer getting rightly pissed off and demand their money back.
On the plus side I can see someone wanting to commit suicide by ODing on sleeping pills picking up homeopathic sleeping pills.
I mention an actual example of this sometimes to my students. Not only did the person in question not die, they didnt even fall asleep.
I seem to recall it was the Amazing Randi, and he did the demo for a bunch of Congresscritters.
Which in hindsight appears to have been a wasted attempt to educate, given that Congress then proceeded to pass DSHEA.
I use the video of him doing that in my senior capstone class. The students love it.
“I mention an actual example of this sometimes to my students. Not only did the person in question not die, they didnt even fall asleep.”
Given the lack of regulation and quality control for homeopathic remedies, that stunt seems potential unsafe if the remedy is falsely labeled.
Funny, I first went ballistic about homeopathic products after an experience at a CVS. I was looking for eye drops, and someone working there (a Pharmacy student that I was teaching at the time!) pointed to some homeopathic products. I thought, OK, this needs to be confronted.
I once (nicely) confronted my local Aurora pharmacist when the drugstore was handing out little bags of free stuff for customer appreciation week or something — and the bags included a homeopathic remedy. As I recall the other items were nondescript things like bandages, eyedrops, and tissues. But deliberately providing homeopathy?
The pharmacist seemed a bit sheepish. His argument that well, people do buy it simply doesn’t apply when Aurora is giving it out for free without anyone asking. That’s going out of the way to endorse homeopathy and creating new customers. As I told him.
Hmph.
Aren’t most eyedrops just saline solution to begin with? What do they do for the homeopathic drops, take out the salt?
No. Eye drops that treat redness, allergy, infection, and so on, contain drugs appropriate to the claimed treatment goal – eg. vasoconstrictors for redness.
They’d better not be just saline for the $12/ounce I pay for them.
I’m not sure that the muscle rub that the reader wanted is a whole lot better than the homeopathic remedy. It just makes the skin feel hot or cold, without affecting anything below.
They are sort of “affecting anything below.” The active ingredient stimulates certain nerve fibers which can cause decreased pain in the region. It’s not helping to fix the underlying problem, but it can reduce pain. Rubbing some alcohol (the homeopathic stuff) on it might have some effect (I doubt it), but then the active ingredient is alcohol, not whatever fake thing the box says it is.
Yeah, it’s a counter-irritant. Rubbing the area accomplishes the same thing, I think. Probably some actual heat or ice would more address the underlying condition, as well as reduce pain.
I also found that arnica can cause allergic reactions in people who are allergic to ragweed. I have had severe allergies to ragweed for my whole life. So, if there is any significant amount of arnica in this stuff, that probably would’ve been bad news for me. An achy knee plus a sneezing fit and watery eyes!
I’m still unclear as to what the labeling of 7% 1X means. Is that diluted 10% 1 time and thus 0.7% or is it really 7%? If it’s the latter, why can’t they just label it in an unambiguous way? Oh…that’s right, they don’t have to because our wonderful Congress has declared that they’re fine with the fine print simply declaring “Not FDA Approved.”
(civil) Comment left with CVS. Helps to have a “spam magnet” e-mail account, as they require an e-mail to comment and will undoubtedly sell it to the thugs of the world.
Ooh, I now know not to do that. I had a previous email address that became unusable because it was being spammed from every retailer on earth just because I filled out a survey online.
I often argue with my fellow Portlanders about the nonsense they spend money on. Homeopathy,acupuncture, cupping, astrology etc. That arnica cream is the only one I had to back off on. While any homeopathic remedy that is diluted is just sugar pills, that cream actually has an active ingredient. The one shown is 7% Arnica Montana derived from a German daisy. This isn’t to say that it’s better than using other topical pain relief only that it has an effect. well.blogs.nytimes.com/2009/09/17/the-alternative-medicine-cabinet-arnica/?_r=0
Do not have a CVS in our one horse town but they are big in the cities for sure. The rip off in Homeopathic is bad but the cosmetics departments in stores may hold the record. Just saw a story on this fraud and typically they can show you a 10 dollar jar and a 150 dollar jar that essentially do the same thing, which is temporary moisturizer. All of those wonder aging creams and no evidence for any of it.
My MD recommended that stuff for arthritis (sp?) pain. When I pointed out that it was a homeopathic remedy, he simply stated that “it works”. It doesn’t of course, unless you really, really want it to.
I was going to recommend hunting for another MD. Then I read the wiki on prevalence of homeopathy all over the world. Now I need a drink. And sucking down a tall glass of homeopathic remedy might just work, because apparently the FDA here allows them to contain “much higher” levels of alcohol than real medicine.
That’s sad. On the one hand, MDs have the thankless job of attempting to keep up technically as tens or hundreds of new drugs hit the market every year. They’re not realistically going to be able to do it. I can’t realistically expect my doctor to know if the latest Pfizer drug does better than the latest Bayer drug or if either of them does significantly better than generic aspirin. OTOH, I’d like to think that most of them could at least eliminate those historically well known and understand classes of bunkum.
The topical cream is only a 1X dilution – the weakest dilution to a homeopath; the exact opposite to anybody else that the most rudimentary understandng of chemistry. You really need to get the Arnica pellets in the little travel vial. Those are a 30C (10^-60) dilution. If you shake that stuff up by walking around with them in your pocket, it will be like black tar heroin.
By ‘the weakest dilution’ do you mean the least diluted (i.e. the strongest solution) or the most diluted (i.e. actually weakest, though a homeopath might think the opposite)?
It’s a bit like standing on your head and trying to describe which way is ‘up’.
cr
I am glad they carry natural products!!
I suspect some products that might actually be effective are labeled as homeopathic even though they aren’t, in an effort to attract consumers. I don’t think there’s any “truth in labeling” requirement for so-called homeopathic remedies.
If THAT occurs, it needs to be stopped immediately. Seriously, if you strongly think some homeopathic product has actual active ingredients in it, call the FDA. Call the local paper. Make some noise. Its one thing to defraud someone by giving them less biologically active chemicals than what you advertise. That’s fraud, but its just basically theft of money; you aren’t contributing harm to their bodies. Its quite a different beast to defraud them by giving them more or different biologically active chemicals than what you’ve advertised. Now you’re poisoning them; that’s reckless endangerment.
AFIK, there is no requirement that homeopathic remedies consist of ultra dilutions, just that the dilution be labeled.
”
http://www.fda.gov/ICECI/ComplianceManuals/CompliancePolicyGuidanceManual/ucm074360.htm
The Homeopathic Pharmacopeia got grandfathered in and is not evidence based, rather, it is whatever the homeopaths who currently update and publish it say it is, and based off of the archaic original from the 1800s.
Arnica Montana, like Miley Stewart, lives a double life. Deluded and diluted.
Recently at CVS I read the label of an OTC remedy for rosacea. It claimed to be a homeopathic product, and the active ingredient was “sulfur (1X).” If I understand their codes correctly, that meant it was undiluted, which is not consistent with any rules of homeopathy I have ever encountered. This is taking fakery to a whole new level – pretending to be fraudulent.
“and the active ingredient was “sulfur (1X).” If I understand their codes correctly, that meant it was undiluted, ”
The homeopathic Latin names and dilution labeling are deliberately misleading.
1X sounds like “1 times”, or undiluted, but the X is actually a Roman numeral ten and the 1 is the number of sequential 1/10th dilutions. So, 1X is 1/10 dilution. A 2X dilution would be 1/10th of 1/10th. A 1C dilution is 1/100th.
However, since homeopathic dilutions are generally made using water or alcohol, it isn’t clear to me how much of the 1/10 sulfur solution has been added to the various “inactive” ingredients in the product. This is why Homeopathic remedies should have to list the actual mass of the “active” ingredient rather than cryptic homeopathic jargon.
At the very least a 1X dilution is not the presumably safe ultra-dilution that so much of homeopathy is. Rather, 1X has real quantities of an active ingredient that can have real effects, both therapeutic and adverse. I don’t think any non-ultradilutions should be allowed to be sold under the loose Homeopathic standards that do not require proof of safety or efficacy.
Homeopaths not only engage in pseudo-science, they engage in pseudo-history as well.
Many of them state their theories go back to Hippocrates.
For a rebuttal, see
http://skepsis.nl/hippocrates-homeopath/
Boots is the largest pharmacy chain in the UK:
Paul Bennett, professional standards director for Boots, told a committee of MPs that the pharmacy chain stocks such items for no other reason than that they are popular.
“There is certainly a consumer demand for these products,” he said. “I have no evidence to suggest they are efficacious.
“It is about consumer choice for us and a large number of our customers believe they are efficacious.”
His comments recall Gerald Ratner’s infamous admission in 1991 that one of the gifts sold by his chain of jewellers was “total crap”.
Mr Bennett made his comments to the House of Commons Science and Technology Committee, which is investigating the scientific evidence behind homoeopathy.
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/finance/newsbysector/retailandconsumer/6658864/Boots-we-sell-homeopathic-remedies-because-they-sell-not-because-they-work.html
Have you ever come across the Nightingale Collaboration? http://www.nightingale-collaboration.org/ They call out manufacturers of woo products by reporting them to the UK’s medical regulatory agencies or the Advertising Standards Authority for making unsubstantiated therapeutic claims. Partly as a result of their efforts, homeopathy in the UK seems to be on a downward spiral.
I asked a pharmacist relative about this in Ontario’s stores. (E.g., Shopper’s Drug Mart, for those who know.) Apparently there was a bit of a rumble by the professional association, but was apparently squeltched because of fear about jobs. (After all, most are employed by these large chains, and all of the chains seem to do it.)
I suggest we should refer to homeopathic products, rather than remedies or medicines. Then we don’t need the scare quotes and don’t accidentally imply that they remedy anything.
I try to say “so-called homeopathic remedies”. Now that I think about it, I guess “homeopathic so-called remedies” is clearer.
Yes, only MONSANTO should not be allowed to turn a profit since they are manufacturing frankenfood. Geesh!! What should be outlawed is naturopathetic and homeopathetic woo for there is no doubt that it is harmful and has caused many unnecessary deaths!!
As far as I can tell, all the pharmacy chains sell this homeopathic ( homeopathetic?) snake oil.
I find very, very few of the nonprescription “remedies” at pharmacies have much of a curative effect at all.
Go to the candy aisle and by M & M’s or jelly bellies. It won’t cure you but it will make you happier, unless you’re diabetic.
I’m shocked to hear that pharmacies in the US sell cigarettes and candy. They sell neither here (NZ) because they are injurious to health. They sometimes have sugar-free candy.
In my pharmacy homeopathic stuff is shelved separately, and I think that’s a common practice. There has been concern that some pharmacists are recommending it, and there is a group I know of trying to find evidence.
The Advertising Standards Authority (ASA) prevents false claims to efficacy on packaging (among other things), and there is a group I’m associated with who are constantly bringing stuff to the Authority’s attention and thus forcing companies to change their advertising, packaging etc. They do an excellent service to the public that most are unaware of. (I haven’t personally done this – other group members compete to get the highest number of successful complaints.) The ASA relies on the public – it would be impossible to fund them to the level they would need to do it all themselves.
More cigarette news that may or may not shock. The govt. put cigs in the K-rations during WWII. The cost of a carton of cigs (that’s 10 packs) in the Commissaries, overseas in 1970 was $1.70 per carton. That’s 17 cents a pack.
Even as late as around 1996 the Commissary price overseas was about 7 or 8 bucks a carton.
Almost all political parties in NZ are cooperating to make smoking a thing of the past by 2025. Part of the reason is that the government pays for healthcare, and stopping people smoking reduces their costs long-term. The gvt pays for smoking cessation programmes, nicotine patches etc. A pack of cigarettes in more than $20 here – the price has been gradually increased each year for a while to discourage smoking. At the last census (2013) smoking was down to 15%, which was a 23% reduction from the previous census.
As far back as WWII, I think our government put them in the rations too, or at least made them available at really cheap prices. It’s not long since you could get them really cheap duty free too, though I think that loophole’s been closed too now.
Apparently there’s now a black market for cigs though, and they’re the target of smash and grab robberies, because they’re so expensive.
Yes, I guess others are doing the same as NZ to put the nail in this bad habit. I just thought it was kind of crazy as I lived through it. The funny thing about the Commissary and their very cheap price for so long is, overseas there is no tax but the real kicker is the Commissary could not raise the price because they were Cost Plus 5%. So what they finally agreed to do was turn over all the cig business to AAFES, that is the Army & Air Force Exchange Service.
So AAFES could charge whatever they wanted and after that, prices took off.
Sounds like AAFES knew a guaranteed stream of income when they saw it.
I find the history of what various countries did re smoking really interesting – thanks for sharing all this. 🙂
And, you are correct in a way – it looked like AAFES was going to clean up and bad news for the Commissary. But actually AAFES did not want the Commissary’s business, although the Commissary was sure they did. The Cig business was maybe 10 or 15 percent of sales in the Commissary. AAFES took ownership of the Cigs in the Commissary but still had to give back most of the money from sales. It was and is nuts. One company owning the inventory of another company but continuing to sell it in the first company store that no longer owns the product. Only in the crazy govt. would you come across something like this. All so you could jack up the price and try to reduce the bad habit.
Here in Canada there have been waves of attempts to use “market controls” and public-interest advertising to reduce amount of smoking. It seems there’s a steady-state amount of smokers here, as the numbers apparently are not going down anymore. I don’t know what this tells us. I also know there’s periodic big stamp outs of blackmarket stuff, including stuff supposedly for “reservation use only”.
It seems to me that NZ would have an easier time with the taxation and such than Canada, too, because it is presumably harder to import there. Here one just visits our friends to the south and illegally brings back stuff (i.e., over the quota one is allowed) – or even uses the lakes (for example) to smuggle.
Yeah, being an isolated island is a big advantage – we have definite Ocean Privilege. We’ve even had success in the drug war because of it. (Except for marijuana because it grows really well in some parts of the country.) New Zealand has the dubious distinction of being the home of the invention of home-bake heroin because Customs are so successful at intercepting the real stuff at the border.
When I was a kid, I remember going through scrapbooks assembled by an elderly relative, when she was a young woman, made up of newspaper clippings published during the Great War after American involvement. (God, I wish I knew where those were now.) It was fascinating to see what journalists were focused on at the time; lots on the Paris Guns. Anyway, I distinctly remember a bit of light verse expounding on what a wonderfully patriotic gesture it was to send cigarettes to the troops in the field. I think that notion of cigarettes as relief from struggle – armed and otherwise – is a theme of the last century.
Exactly. The cigs would have been a remedy for shell shock. Get you back in the fight after a few puffs.
Or a way to make peace, after a fashion, ironically one of the original uses of tobacco. On a thread from a week or so ago I commented how my distant German relative was given cigarettes by American soldiers as a POW.
Those would be cool to get a look at!
In a similar but more humorous vein, I vaguely recall that there is an old, old quote from a British or European military commander after coffee started being introduced from the Americas in the 16th-17th century. It was becoming quite the rage and it was suggested that it be given to soldiers instead of their standard ‘fortitude enhancer.’ The quote goes something to the effect of (I’m obviously paraphrasing): “I’m not going to give my troops this experimental crap! They’re going to get their standard liquor allotment, like all good soldiers!”
You don’t buy candy and cigarettes at the pharmacy? Do you also not buy all your beer at the gas station? What kind of place do you live in?
No, no beer at the petrol station (as we call them) either. Or bears either for that matter.
Beer was only in specialty alcohol stores until fairly recently. Not many years ago it was allowed to be sold in supermarkets along with wine. You still have to go to the specialty stores for any other alcohol. You have to be 18 to buy it.
In California, not only do the supermarkets sell hard liquor, some of them have their own house brands of it. I used to use Safeway brand brandy for cooking candied sweet potatoes. Funny think though, all the years I made them I never had any urge to actually drink the stuff. 🙂
Well I can’t say I’ve noticed our local (NZ) pharmacy selling homeopathic ‘remedies’. Or sugary sweets for that matter.
But what they do sell are huge amounts of snake-oil products like multivitamins, ‘diet supplements’ and ‘sports drinks’ (which are all just sugar, hugely marked up, anyway. I want a quick energy boost I’ll buy a bar of chocolate and a Coke at a fraction of the ripoff price, thank you). Why do I call the vitamins ‘snake oil’? Because that’s what they are *unless* you have a relevant vitamin deficiency. 90% of the customers that buy them would get just as much benefit from homeopathic water. They’re wasting their money.
And unfortunately advertising of prescription drugs is permitted on our TV. “Ask your doctor if Maxitripe is right for you”.
cr
Ironically, while US pharmacies are selling beer and cigarettes and candy (and regular vitamins), GNC often sets up their own stores which exclusively sell their megavitamin and health supplement stuff.
Its kind weird but it makes a perverse sort of marketing sense: everyone knows what aspirin is and most people confidently expect it to work, so Bayer doesn’t need to go to any special effort to make themselves look trustworthy. They just sell their product in Safeway or at any retailer who wants to vend it. But GNC products don’t have that well-earned reputation of efficacy, so they intentionally ‘assume the outward trappings of medical expertise’ by creating specialty stores.
I agree with you about vitamins etc. I think us and the US are the only two countries allowed to advertise prescription drugs. I’ve heard docs get pretty annoyed about people, “checking with” their doctor whether it’s right for them. Even worse was that one for the made-up condition over-active bladder.
Our “pharmacies” are really more like mini supermarkets. Its rare in the US to find something equivalent to a European or Commonwealth style pharmacy that only sells drugs.
Which may factor into why people like me think less of the fact that these stores carry homeopathic stuff. Yes, I would be extremely annoyed if I went into a “pure” pharmacy, asked for a drug for my sickness, and got handed something homeopathic by the guy/woman in the white coat whom society expects me to trust. However, that is a pretty disanalogous situation from self-service shopping at the local CVS.
Interesting. Thanks.
Just a further follow-up. We do have the classic white-lab-coat wearing pharmacists, and they work in the pharmacies I’m talking about. But their job is to distribute prescription drugs and a few other items (they give flu shots, for instance). They do not typically serve as standard “customer service” reps who will walk down the aisle and recommend a brand of cough drop. If they aren’t busy and you ask them nicely for shopping help they might do that, but it isn’t their job; their job is really just to fill doctor’s official prescriptions.
They also are responsible for giving out Sudafed to customers who want it. Its not prescription, but so many people started using it to make crystal meth that the government pulled it from the shelves. Now you can buy it on request, but I believe your purchase is tracked so they can identify when someone starts buying loads and loads of it.
Yes, this is correct. I have to hand over my Driver’s License to buy Sudafed, but a homeopathic remedy that I’m quite likely allergic to and doesn’t work for my ailment? Have at it!
As I said in the original mail to Jerry, I’m with you that it’s fine if CVS sells these “cures” but I don’t want to be duped into buying it. It should be abundantly clear that the section you walk into is not actually medicine, but rather an aisle of snake oil of dubious value.
Sounds like what our pharmacists do, though they’ll help you choose stuff like the right cold remedy if they have time too.
Our government has taken drugs like Sudafed off the shelves too, and it’s tracked. We call the drug they make from it “P” – short for pure methamphetamine.
I just wish they would sell love potions and spells to thwart enemies too. There is more to life than alleviating neck pain.
This isn’t “homeopathic” in the woo sense, it’s just arnica cream, a useful and effective treatment for muscle pain that’s been used that way for centuries. The dilution here is listed as 1X and the box says it’s 7%, which is more concentrated than most medicines you can buy. It’s unfortunate that your reader Chris was so misled by what you’ve said about “homeopathic” treatments that he didn’t give it a real chance, since it would likely have been effective.
The knee-jerk reactions by the skeptic community against anything called “homeopathic”, when the word is often used colloquially to mean “natural” or “traditional” rather than as a reference to superdilution, are misguided and frankly embarrassing.
“This isn’t “homeopathic” in the woo sense, it’s just arnica cream, a useful and effective treatment for muscle pain that’s been used that way for centuries.”
This product is *officially* homeopathic, as labeled by the manufacturer.
The asterisks lead to a tiny, buried version of what Orac calls the Quack Miranda Warning at the very, very bottom of the web page:
“*These “Uses” have not been evaluated by the Food and Drug Administration. **C, K, CK, and X are homeopathic dilutions.”
http://www.arnicare.com/arnicare-cream/
If you feel the product is mislabeled you might wish to take it up with Boiron. However, I agree that labeling what are essentially herbal remedies with actual molecules of ingredient in the product as “homeopathic” is misleading given the Law of Infinitesimals is a key component of homeopathy, and of the presumed safety of homeopathy. Remedies with actual ingredients should have to prove their safety and efficacy rather than being presumed to be safe on the presumption that homeopathic remedies are typically nothing but water, alcohol or sugar.
This isn’t “homeopathic” in the woo sense, it’s just arnica cream, a useful and effective treatment for muscle pain that’s been used that way for centuries. The dilution here is listed as 1X and the box says it’s 7% which is more concentrated than most medicines you can buy. It’s unfortunate that your reader Chris was so misled by what you’ve said about “homeopathic” treatments that he didn’t give it a real chance, since it would likely have been effective.
The knee-jerk reactions by the skeptic community against anything called “homeopathic”, when the word is often used colloquially to mean “natural” or “traditional” rather than as a reference to superdilution, are misguided and frankly embarrassing.
natural=traditional=woo.
I was looking at some of these products in a local pharmacy in Hungary recently. There were several arnica preparations labelled homeopathic with typical dilutions but also one claiming 7% active ingredient. This particularly caught my attention as the ‘real’ Arnica next to it only had 5%.
Arnica is not approved by the FDA and has been deemed unsafe.
If you go to my response in thread #1 of this post, check out the link to the John Oliver segment I posted. The fact that these unregulated items don’t even necessarily always contain the ingredients they say they do should raise even more alarm than true homeopathic dilutions. My “knee-jerk” reaction does not negate the substance of my claim that this stuff should not be packaged alongside medicines that have been FDA approved and undergone rigorous evaluation.
It is clearly labelled as homeopathic. If it contains any measurable amount of active ingredient it is NOT homeopathic, and therefore is incorrectly labelled.
You should be able to drink gallons of any genuinely homeopathic ‘remedy’ without harm (other than possible waterlogging), assuming always that it’s been made with potable water.
I myself have been drinking homeopathic cyanide all my life, with no ill effects. Also homeopathic hydrogen fluoride and homeopathic methyl mercury. (It comes out of the tap. That’s ‘faucet’ in Americanian).
cr
It’s never occurred to me that faucet is American lingo. I knew what tap meant; I’ve always referred to tap water as the water that comes from the tap in your house, yet if I were to go to the hardware store, I’d buy a replacement faucet. We Americans are strange.
Might be subject to regional variations. “Soft drink” and “yam”, for example, have lots of regional versions in the US.
(I seem to remember being told by one of my American colleagues when I was at CMU that a way to start a fight was to invite Americans from all over the US to Thanksgiving and then ask “what color are yams?”)
Regardless of color, yams are disgusting! (Now that’ll start a real fight. 😉 )
And yet in a recent thread one contributor was stating that if they had to buy a ‘tap’ they would buy the bolt-threading tool. 😉
So I stuck in that comment just to clarify. I imagined that all Americans said ‘faucet’. As Keith Douglas noted, maybe it’s a regional thing.
Agreed you Americans are strange, but no stranger than everybody else. As my current French teacher says when ‘explaining’ some quirk of grammar, ‘it’s French!’.
cr
Several years ago I needed to cold medicine since I was starting to feel one coming on and was going on a trip. Duane Reade was out of actual medicine and at the time I was unaware that homeopathic meant placebo, so I bought an over priced box of sugar pills. Needless to say they did nothing, unlike some actual medicine which might have helped.
From their own website:
http://health.cvs.com/GetContent.aspx?token=f75979d3-9c7c-4b16-af56-3e122a3f19e3&chunkiid=38314
“Despite its widespread use in some countries, virtually no scientific authority takes homeopathy seriously. There are several reasons for this intense skepticism, but the most important focuses on a basic fact of chemistry. Simply put, there is nothing material left in a “high-potency” homeopathic product; some force of nature unknown to modern science would have to be involved for homeopathy to work.”
Wow. That whole section is amazing. I have gained a bit of new respect for CVS. They still shouldn’t put it near the medicines, though.
Another excerpt:
“Since basic principles of medical science are at odds with the foundational theory of homeopathy, what should be made of the occasional randomized controlled trial that appears to show benefit? Do flaws lie in medical science or with completed research? It is unlikely that homeopathy operates through some mysterious new force that science has failed to discover. It is far more likely that the positive outcomes were the result of flawed trials that produced unreliable results.”
My podiatrist recommended arnica (as strong a preparation as I could find) for minor ankle pain. I found a 16% solution on the ‘net, that has nothing homeopathic about it. It seems to help as much as other topicals, i.e., not a whole lot — or so has been my experience.
Presumably for the “helenalin”
From the Wikipedia page [given by PCC(E) above in the post’s first word / first line] for CVS Pharmacy thus:
“Homeopathy
On April 1, 2011, the James Randi Educational Foundation awarded CVS Pharmacy the tongue-in-cheek Pigasus Award for selling homeopathic remedies alongside medicines recognized by science.[56]”
with citation / reference #[56] stated as thus: ” ^ Mestel, Rosie (April 1, 2011). ‘Dr. Oz, Andrew Wakefield and others, um, ‘honored’ by James Randi’. Los Angeles Times. Retrieved April 2, 2011.”
Yea, Wikipedia !
Blue
There’s nothing wrong with homeopathic remedies. They are entirely as effective as the alternatives I’ve tested. For instance, when I had a cold and took a homeopathic remedy to fix it, I got better in seven days. When I had a cold and didn’t take any medication at all, I got better in a week. See!
I did contact them and let them know I didn’t think it was a good idea for these products to be shelved together. They said they’d pass it on to the people who handle product placement for the stores…
CVS: Clinically Vacuous Substance.