Will Walgreens become the Preferred Drug Store for cigarette smokers?

Will Walgreen's lengthy Chicago-area history help it keep business if tobacco products actually become an issue?

I have to admit to being somewhat amused this week by the announcement by CVS that they will stop selling cigarettes and other tobacco products later this year.

It has me wondering if the business battle between newcomer CVS and long-time Chicago-area pharmaceutical retailer Walgreen’s will now turn to trying to gain a business advantage concerning those people who need to have their daily dose of “smokes.”

WILL CVS NOW try to claim a high moralistic attitude because they won’t sell cigarettes? Will they be the start of a trend in which the sight of all those racks of cigarette packs and cartons behind the cash register will become obsolete?

Or something you only see in a seedier sort of business?

Is that what Walgreen’s is destined to become? Since the Deerfield-based retailer indicated this week they do not plan to follow suit on cigarettes.

They’re adopting the line of logic used by convenience stores, gasoline stations and other businesses that include tobacco products on their shelves – they add to the financial bottom line in a way that can make the difference between being profitable or going out of business altogether.

HOW FAR WILL Walgreen’s be prepared to carry this decision out? Because they certainly want to be taken seriously in terms of health care issues.

In fact, there are those industry analysts who contend that CVS’ decision to drop cigarettes from their stores is less about a high-minded moral statement and more about a bottom-line business decision.

As in they can make more money ultimately by having various clinics, vaccination services and other health care options in their stores – services with which the sight of cigarette cartons would just be too much of a clash!

Personally, I don’t smoke. I never have. Just something about the smell was always so unappealing that I never felt compelled to try.

WHICH MAKES ME not so much appreciate a business that doesn’t encourage smoking, as much as dislike a business that does.

I have way too many memories of getting stuck in lines waiting to make a purchase because the person right ahead of me either can’t make up their mind what brand of cigarettes they want, or (more often) are getting all worked up into a frenzy that demands to see a store manager because the sales clerk can’t figure out which of the variety of brands it is that the customer wants.

Invariably, it winds up being a small purchase I was making (sometimes, as little as purchasing a newspaper or two – yes, I still prefer ink on paper to this format).

Which makes such a purchase a bigger deal than it has to be!

THERE’S ALSO THE case that I currently live at a place with both a Walgreen’s and a CVS store within three blocks of me. I can’t say I favored either one of them in the past.

But I may well have to start spending more money at the CVS if this tobacco sales issue actually becomes a controversy.

Because I’m sure the people who want to view their cigarettes as some sort of civil rights issue (never mind the real issues of our society) will be more than willing to make a stink about this – and not just because their clothes and breath reeks of inhaling too much tobacco fumes throughout their lives.

There are times when I wonder if people are willing to “fight to the death” for their cigarette habit as intensely as those who are making an issue of “concealed carry. Perhaps it’s the same people – a cigarette pack in the shirt pocket and pistol tucked in the hip.

OR MAYBE A cigarette pack and pistol tucked in the purse?

While the rest of us consider fighting for issues that really matter in our daily lives. Including which place might help us look out better for our health.

Could that now be CVS?

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More of those moments when logic seems (at first) to fly out the window

The cop who sent a text message to a 12-year-old asking her to send him “sexy” pictures of herself who will not face any additional discipline?

Or the mother who claims she got fired from her job at a grocery store because she chose to stay at home with her son on one of the days when Arctic-like weather caused the schools to be closed?

THOSE WERE A pair of stories that turned up in the news coverage on Wednesday; both of which are meant to arouse the reaction of us shaking our fists in anger and shouting out some epithet about damned fools who just can’t appreciate logic.

Although I’m sure there is a letter-of-the-law interpretation by which both actions are completely justifiable.

Personally, I’m more offended by the predicament facing Woodstock police Sergeant Chip Amati, who did get a 30-day suspension without pay after it was learned he sent the text message seeking salacious photographs.

The girl was the daughter of the woman Amati was dating at the time, and she was the one who objected to his conduct when she learned of it.

WOODSTOCK MUNICIPAL OFFICIALS penalized Amati back in October, particularly after it was learned that the sergeant also had used police computer databases to learn more about his girlfriend – even though police policies specifically prevented officers from using the databases for personal use.

The Chicago Tribune reported Wednesday that village officials determined no additional punishment is possible because Amati cannot be disciplined more than once for the same offense.

So those people who want to view Amati as some sort of miscreant for his behavior toward the 12-year-old are going to have to accept the fact that nothing more will happen.

Even though the newspaper noted that he never really lost a month’s worth of pay – because the Police Department in Woodstock is choosing to split the time up into increments; thereby reducing its impact on his personal and professional life.

AARGH!!!!!!!

Some people are having that same reaction this week about Rhiannon Broschat, a 25-year-old from the Logan Square neighborhood who used to work at a Whole Foods grocery store in the Lake View neighborhood.

The Chicago Sun-Times reported Wednesday that about 40 people picketed the company’s regional headquarters in the River North neighborhood on Broschat’s behalf.

She says that when the Chicago Public Schools were closed on Jan. 28 because of the wintry weather, she was unable to find someone who could stay with her “special needs” son. So, she says she called the store to tell them she could not show up at work – even though she had a shift scheduled for that day.

WHOLE FOODS OFFICIALS won’t comment on the incident, but Broschat says her store called her the next day, telling them she had abused the company’s attendance policy.

On the surface, it easily becomes a case of a callous company punishing a person for not putting corporate needs ahead of their personal ones. Although my gut reaction is to wonder how many other times had she been forced to call in absent because of personal needs.

I can comprehend how the job needs to get done, and that the company might want to find someone else who is capable of doing it. Yet I don’t know that this is the exact circumstance that led to this woman’s current “unemployed” status.

Who’s to say how this particular case turns out.

ULTIMATELY, IT COMES down to perspective, as Broschat herself told the Sun-Times she’s convinced she made the “right decision” when she chose to stay home with her son.

I’m sure that with all the cold weather and number of days the local schools have been closed in recent months, there are a slew of parents who suddenly found themselves in the same jam that Broschat made and will be totally sympathetic to her choice.

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Is Hoffman the new century’s Belushi?

All the reports these days about the death of actor Philip Seymour Hoffman have been bringing about three-decade old memories of that moment when we learned that actor John Belushi had died.

Because the ultimate story of both of their lives will turn out to be the same – someone who let their drug use get the best of them, while taking out a talent that will make us all speculate for years to come just how much more would we have been entertained from future productions that will never be made!

NOW I KNOW that the two don’t have identical life and career cycles.

Belushi – born in the Humboldt Park neighborhood and raised in suburban Wheaton – only got into five film productions before his 1982 death at age 33. Hoffman, by comparison, appeared in about 60 film roles prior to passing on at age 46.

There are many aspiring actors who would love to have a career anywhere as extensive as Hoffman’s. And they’d certainly fall sort of the Academy Award Hoffman took for his starring role in “Capote.”

Heck, Belushi never came close – although I suspect the image of him as “Bluto” in Animal House sticks out in some peoples’ minds as much as any Oscar-winning role.

ULTIMATELY, IT’S GOING to be the end of their stories that will draw comparisons.

A woman wound up doing prison time for being the one who allegedly gave Belushi an injection into his arm (a “speedball” cocaine and heroin mixture, if memory is correct) that caused him to die at a borderline raunchy hotel in Hollywood.

While in the case of Hoffman, we’re going to forever live with the image of his body being found with a hypodermic needle still sticking in it. Police also found something anywhere between 40 and 70 bags of heroin in his apartment (depending on which newspaper account you read).

They’re still investigating to see if the heroin was mixed with the pain reliever fentanyl. This will be the trivial detail people will remember for years to come when Hoffman’s name comes up.

AND HIS NAME will come up, because the man had so many roles in a variety of films. It wasn’t just “Capote,” or the other films (“Charlie Wilson’s War,” “Doubt” and “The Master”) for which he was nominated for Oscars.

In fact, films I most associate with him were ones where he had supporting roles, such as “The Big Lebowski,” “Moneyball” and “Almost Famous.” His take on the 1970s rock journalist Lester Bangs is a bit part more memorable than many starring roles these days.

Just as I consider Belushi in “Continental Divide” to be an underrated role – even if the only thing believable about his portrayal as a newspaper columnist was a certain aversion to the outdoors.

But to a certain degree, none of this is going to matter. Both of their lives were cut short by the substance abuse. Both of them struggled with the drugs during their lives, and ultimately became a little too wrapped up in them.

TO THE DEGREE that when Washington-based journalist Bob Woodward tried to take on the Hollywood culture, his biography of Belushi turned into a final third of the book that was a blow-by-blow account of all the drugs he consumed in the final couple of weeks of his life.

Is this what we’re destined to get in coming weeks and months, as more details come out about the sordidness of Hoffman’s drug use (which he tried to resist, but ultimately gave in to)?
 

Let’s only hope the collective bodies of work for the two will not get buried in the minutia!

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Daley illness evidence of our cynicism?

I shouldn’t be shocked at the level of cynicism that crops up when our political people – or even ex-pols – become ill.

DALEY, M.: In recovery?

Former Mayor Richard M. Daley spent the past weekend at Northwestern Memorial Hospital suffering from what some are saying are stroke-like symptoms (although no one will come right out and say the 71-year-old suffered a stroke).

YET WHEN ONE turns to the Internet to see the ramblings of those people who insist on posting anonymous tidbits, there are more than those share of people who are convinced this is some sort of plot.

Daley is trying to avoid criminal prosecution in the future. For what, those people don’t specify. But I literally found one individual who says that this illness is fake – and is meant to provide cover in the form of him being able to testify under oath that he doesn’t remember anything about whatever it is that he is accused in the future of doing.

I’m not saying that there aren’t people professionally ambitious enough to try to prosecute a case that dredges up some past action of government during the Daley administration.

I’m sure there are people who would like Daley to suffer legal consequences for the mess that was made of our parking meters! There are times when I could be counted amongst them.

BUT PEOPLE WHO are taking Daley’s physical condition and trying to score politics are just striking me as being a bit too callous to take seriously.

Even though I’ll agree with those who think that there’s something funky about the amount of time it has taken to get a diagnosis – or that some of the details we have heard don’t seem to be fleshed out.

DALEY, J.: Died while in office

This is a story that is most definitely incomplete. While I comprehend that Daley is no longer a public official (he chose retirement in 2011, rather than dying as mayor like his father, Richard J., or at his desk like Harold Washington), there is still enough interest in him for people to want to know what happened when he supposedly became disoriented Friday while attending a legal conference in Arizona.

Because Daley is who he is, he got rushed back to Chicago – rather than trusting a Phoenix-area hospital to deal with his condition.

I WILL ADMIT to being amused by the fact that he was hospitalized the same day that his nephew, R.J. Vanecko, pleaded guilty and got that 60-day county jail sentence for his involvement in the death of a young man a decade ago.

WASHINGTON: Died literally in office

Mainly because Daley aides felt compelled to immediately say that word of his nephew’s legal predicament had nothing to do with his medical condition. Which is what many people would have presumed, had nothing been said.

It makes me wonder what statement is being concocted for dissemination on Tuesday – which is the day that both the Chicago Tribune and Chicago Sun-Times newspapers say will be when a 162-page special prosecutor’s report on Vanecko’s case will be made public.

Will somebody be a little too eager to find some physical downtown for Daley that occurs Tuesday, then try to make a connection?

OF COURSE, ALL of this brings back memories of Daley’s father, who himself suffered a stroke a couple of years before his death in December 1976. He recovered, and actually got re-elected to his final term in office as a result.

Daley, by comparison, is now an attorney who doesn’t have the stress of running for any office. His time in public policy is past.

Unless some people are determined to use this incident to somehow dredge him back into the public eye.

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Hang around Chicago long enough, and even the outlandish becomes common

It’s not every day that a man who is both the namesake grandson and nephew of Chicago mayors enters a “guilty” plea to a criminal charge related to the death of another human being.

KOSCHMAN: Will his memory now rest?

Yet there was something about the plea entered in a Rolling Meadows-based courtroom by R.J. Vanecko that seemed so similar to a criminal case from a quarter-century ago. It makes me wonder how long until we again get a connected defendant who catches a break when forced to face the criminal justice system.

FOR THE RECORD, Richard Joseph Vanecko (whose mother was a daughter of Richard J. Daley and an older sister to Richard M.) entered the guilty plea – rather than go to trial in a case that could have began later this month.

He got a 60-day jail sentence, along with some additional time wearing an ankle bracelet meant to confine him to his home. He’ll also get a 30-month probation period.

Let’s be honest. If his name weren’t tied into the Daley family tree, he wouldn’t have gotten off so easily. Because there is a man who has been dead for a decade,

I’m sure some will argue that true injustice would have been if his case wasn’t resurrected. Cook County prosecutors originally didn’t want to touch the incident when it actually occurred.

IT TOOK THE attention-drawing efforts of the Chicago Sun-Times, along with a special prosecutor and a judge called in from suburban McHenry County, to get to the point we’re at right now.

All of this reminds me of a criminal case I covered back when I was a “City News Kid” reporter-type some 25 years ago.

VANECKO: Paying debt to society?

It was a case involving two early-20s-type men who had been drinking heavily in a Clearing neighborhood (near Midway Airport) tavern. They got hostile, and one man beat the other to death with a baseball bat when he thought the other was reaching for a pistol of some sort.

Actually, the man was reaching for a tire iron, so perhaps he had the same intention of administering a beating with a deadly weapon.

WHICH IS WHY that man ultimately got a two-month sentence in the Cook County Jail. In fact, what I remember from the case is that after they took into account the amount of “time served” right after his bond hearing but before he could come up with the money to be released from jail, the actual amount of time he still had to serve was all of two weeks before he could start getting on with the rest of his life. While the victim remains dead some 25 years later!

DALEY: What would namesake think?

Oh, the other thing about this case was that the defendant was the son of a Chicago police Violent Crimes detective based at 51^st Street and Wentworth Avenue.

A cop’s kid managed to do something stupid that caused the death of someone else. That’s not to the same degree of public attention as Richard J. Vanecko got. But it is still enough to gain attention, which is why I covered that particular story back in the days when I covered the Criminal Courts building on a regular basis.

I also recall the judge from that particular case. Thomas Maloney, who later was charged, and convicted, of allegations that he took bribes to fix the results of murder cases.

I DON’T HAVE any evidence that the cop kid’s case was in any way fixed. Although I still remember the day the kid was sentenced as being the closest I ever came to being found in contempt of court by a judge. He threatened me with arrest because he didn't like my whispering to a reporter-type who was sitting next to me.

I’m sure that Maloney was aware of every single reporter-type person who was in the courtroom, and was looking for even the slightest excuse he could think of in order to have us removed.

Because our accounts of the verdict and sentence could stir up public resentment (I still recall the mother of the victim complaining that her son couldn’t get true justice). Unless the judge were to impose a harsh sentence.

In which case, he’d make enemies within the Police Department.

BUT BACK TO Vanecko, who is now in the early days of serving his sentence – which, to my sensibilities, is the quirky part of this whole case.

Because the special judge was brought in from McHenry County, Judge Maureen McIntyre sentenced him to serve the time in her county’s jail.

Vanecko will be up in northwest suburban Woodstock for a couple of months. While that’s not a jail facility anyone chooses to go to, it is less onerous than the Cook County Jail complex.

And definitely a lot easier to cope with than one of the facilities in the Illinois Department of Corrections system – which are so crowded they’re probably grateful not to have to deal with Vanecko.

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EDITOR’S NOTE: I also was amused to see just how quickly former Mayor Richard M. Daley’s illness and hospitalization this week was in no way a reaction to learning that his nephew now has a criminal record.

EXTRA: Serie del Caribe to get Chicago Sout' Side baseball viewpoint

The ballplayers taking part in the Caribbean Series beginning Saturday were from places scattered all over Latin America, while the umpires came from Mexico and Cuba.

The advertisements around the ballpark were for Polar-brand beer (get it?), while the fans danced to merengue music (rather than the heavy metal or rap music riffs we hear in U.S. ballparks).

AND THE WEATHER or Margarita Island in Venezuela, where this year’s Caribbean Series baseball tourney is being played, was so un-Chicago – sunny skies and 88-degree temperatures on Saturday afternoon.

Which is why I was amused to learn of the broadcast crews that way too many baseball fans will ignore because they’ve been brainwashed into thinking that the Super Bowl somehow matters – or that they’re supposed to care about overpriced commercial spots that will air during the game.

It was as Chicago as one could get.

I found it amusing to tune in to the pre-game show and see that the usual ESPN Deportes broadcasters were joined by one-time White Sox manager Ozzie Guillen – who didn’t give us any verbal whoppers, but tried to make himself appear to be quite the baseball expert.

THEN AGAIN, THE Caribbean Series runs through next Saturday. There will be plenty of opportunities for Ozzie to say something that will manage to tick off somebody, while amusing, entertaining or informing the rest of us.

Although if by chance you didn’t watch the ballgame on television (I don’t know your access to the ESPN Deportes channel – station number 609 on my television set), keep in mind that the ESPN Spanish-language radio broadcasts are using one-time baseball pitcher Orlando "El Duque” Hernandez to give player insight to the broadcasts.

Hernandez might well be remembered most as a New York Yankees pitcher. But let’s not forget his stint with the White Sox team that won the 2005 World Series. His relief pitching stint in the final playoff game that year against the Boston Red Sox (where he pitched three perfect innings, prevented the White Sox from blowing a one-run lead AND made Red Sox slugger Manny Ramirez in particular look like a total chump) is one of those memorable moments.

And I’m sure that to the mindset of the Red Sox fan, Hernandez’s White Sox road uniform looked remarkably similar to when he wore Yankees road grays and did his part to repeatedly shut them down.


An improvement over Bud?

GUILLEN AND HERNANDEZ – it’s a shame they won’t be a part of the same broadcast at some point. Perhaps we’d get a reminiscence or two of that special season from nine years ago when a Chicago ball club actually wound up being the best.

 

Before they go back to telling us about this year’s versions of the Licey Tigers (the Dominican Republic’s champions) or the Hermosillo Orange Growers (from Mexico), or the fact that Cuba is once again being included in a tourney that purports to give us the championship of all Latin America.

All in all, it has me hoping that there’s some truth to the speculation that Caribbean Series officials are considering a change in the rotation of host nations so that it will come to the United States (most likely at the Miami Marlins’ ballpark near the "Little Havana" neighborhood that has cropped up along Eighth Street) in future years.

Be honest. It will be a more interesting spectacle than anything likely to happen Sunday when football (not futbol) fans freeze their behinds off in the wintry weather of the Jersey-based suburbs of New York City.

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EDITOR'S NOTE: One little tidbit when watching a Spanish-language baseball broadcast. When you hear the announcer say that the batter was "punched out," it means he was struck out by the pitcher. Not that any kind of brawl was about to take place.
 

Dart the enemy? Or the only one showing sense on concealed carry?

I have no doubt that Cook County Sheriff Tom Dart has become the new “enemy,” so to speak, amongst the people who are proponents of more firearms amongst the populace.

DART: Watching out for firearms?

For years, the man that those people tried to demonize was Richard M. Daley. But he’s gone now, so they need a new public official whom they will claim is trying to take away their weapons.

IT PROBABLY WILL be Dart, whose agency, it turns out, is challenging significantly more applications for concealed carry permits than any other law enforcement entity. Permits that likely will actually be issued beginning in March.

Yet when one looks at the numbers realistically, it isn’t so much that Dart is trying to deny people their right-wing judge-given “right” to carry a firearm in public, as that other law enforcement entities are making little effort to deny anyone the state-issued permit that is required for someone to carry a pistol on their person in public for alleged self-defense purposes.

According to the Chicago Sun-Times, some 33,631 applications for concealed carry permits are now pending. Of those, only 236 are facing objections by a law enforcement entity on grounds that the applicant has a significant criminal record or a history of mental illness.

Dart will get trashed by some because of those 236 pending objections (which a special panel created by Gov. Pat Quinn will now rule on), 120 of them are from the Cook County Sheriff’s police.

BY COMPARISON, ONLY seven objections were filed by the Chicago Police Department. Twenty five more were filed by suburban police departments in Cook County – with nine coming from the southwestern municipality of Oak Lawn.

Which means the other 84 objections were filed in the other 101 counties across Illinois, although 49 of those were filed in the surrounding counties that make up the outer suburbs.

So yes, the phenomenon of law enforcement being skeptical about who should be allowed a permit that gives them permission to carry a pistol in a shoulder holster or in a purse seems to be an urban one.

DALEY: The old "enemy" for firearms

Although when one considers that some 7,974 permit applications were filed in Cook County, the fact that local law enforcement is only challenging 152 (not quite 2 percent), it really can’t be argued that our law enforcement is running amok over anyone’s alleged constitutional right.

PARTICULARLY, SINCE ONLY about one-quarter of the applications across the state came from Cook County (which accounts for about 45 percent of the state’s population overall).

It just really can’t be argued that Tom Dart is behaving like some sort of tyrant when it comes to wanting to make sure that people who shouldn’t be having firearms don’t somehow get them with the consent of the state.

Of course, when it comes to the type of rhetoric used by the firearms advocates, I have no doubt they will try to blast the sheriff for not kissing up to their attitude when it comes to pistols.

Not that Dart – who isn’t a career law enforcement-type – isn’t all that different from Chicago police-types on this issue.

I HAVE ENCOUNTERED many police officers who were more than supportive of the ordinances the city had in place for three-plus decades that made it a criminal offense for most people to even have a firearm within the city limits.

Nobody is hunting within the city (unless they’re going out in search of other people, which is most definitely something we should discourage). There really isn’t a need for another pistol around 63^rd and Halsted streets.

And for those people who are insecure enough that they can’t venture outside without carrying a weapon, I’d wonder what worse will occur if, by chance, you feel threatened and fire – only to miss your target and hit someone else who just happened to be nearby!

In fact, about the worst thing I can think of to say about Dart these days is that he identifies as a Chicago Cubs fan. Which, in the overall scheme of things, is something that can be forgiven, since it's a self-inflicted form of agony.

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