CT Mirror33%
More than 17% of Connecticut residents live in a ‘pharmacy desert’ 8%
By Calista Oetama10%
7/31/2026, 11:19:03 AM
BS Summary: This article contains 25 faulty reasoning types, including Hasty Generalization, Availability Heuristic, and Appeal to Authority, with Anecdotal as the most egregious example at 9% saturation with 145 hits. Analysis detected 1,206 faulty-reasoning hits from 1,618 analyzed words, generating a BS Score of 19.5% and a BS Rank of 8% (23,443 of 25,262 articles). This article is better (less manipulative) than 92.80% of the article peer group.
Walter Douglass owns and operates Durham Pharmacy in Durham.
Douglass is a pharmacist and runs the store with his wife, Carol Douglass.
Walter and Carol Douglass have run Durham’s only pharmacy for 40 years.
First established in 1959 amid rising Cold War tensions, the cellar of the pharmacy was originally a bomb shelter — made of thick cement and resistant to immense pressure.
Carol Douglass, 68, joined the pharmacy as a high school student in the 1970s, while Walter Douglass, 71, assumed the role of pharmacist and owner in 1981.
They’ve been married for 28 years.
While Walter Douglass is technically the sole owner of the pharmacy, he refers to his wife as a co-owner, “my left and right and middle hand.”
They fill 150 prescriptions and greet more than 100 customers a day.
“They become your family,” Douglass said.
“Over the course of 40 years, I’ve seen the grandkids, the great-grandkids.”
Carol Douglass fills prescriptions in Durham Pharmacy in Durham on July 30, 2026.
Douglass is a pharmacist and operates the drug store with her husband, Walter Douglass.
Credit: Julia Levine / CT Mirror
But shops like Durham Pharmacy are becoming more rare.
A 2025 study in JAMA Network Open found that more than 17% of Connecticut residents live in a pharmacy desert, or census tracts where the travel time to the nearest pharmacy exceeded the travel time to the nearest supermarket, and an additional 7% live in areas that are one pharmacy closure away from becoming pharmacy deserts.
Studies have shown that pharmacies close at faster rates, and the role of pharmacy benefit managers in determining benefits means independent stores such as Durham Pharmacy face a greater risk of closure.
But Durham Pharmacy has lasted almost 70 years.
Walter Douglass, who’s seen countless pharmacies open and shutter, attributes the pharmacy’s longevity to its role as a community hub and, by extension, its fiercely loyal customer base.
“They all come here, and it really makes me feel like we’re a part of the community,” Walter Douglass said.
“They depend on us to be here.”
Aside from Durham Pharmacy, the nearest pharmacy to the town is a CVS in Middletown more than six miles away.
Data from the Yale School of Medicine used in the JAMA study identifies Durham as a pharmacy desert: it takes longer to travel from the center of the town to the nearest pharmacy than it does to the nearest supermarket.
Many studies that try to quantify access to resources, such as the USDA’s Food Access Research Atlas that inspired the pharmacy desert study, use fixed distances or travel times as a metric for determining deserts.
But Walter “Stan” Mathis, an associate professor at the Yale School of Medicine and lead author of the JAMA study, thought this approach did not take differences in individual localities into account.
Wanting to determine a “local norm of travel time,” he compared supermarket travel time thresholds , adjusted for urbanicity, to pharmacy travel times.
Census tracts in which pharmacy travel times exceeded supermarket travel times were considered pharmacy deserts.
Durham Pharmacy in Durham on July 30, 2026.
The pharmacy has been operating for over 60 years.
Credit: Julia Levine / CT Mirror
Mathis notes in the study’s limitation section that using supermarket access as a metric assumes that stores are perfectly distributed to meet demand.
Jenny S.
Guadamuz, an assistant professor of health policy and management at the University of California, Berkeley, believes this method obscures communities typically identified as lacking access to supermarkets, such as Black, Latino, rural and low-income communities.
She considers the 17% figure an undercount.
“If their closest pharmacy is further away than their closest supermarket, then it’s considered a pharmacy desert,” she said, “meaning that areas that are already likely to lack supermarkets are artificially less likely to be a pharmacy desert.”
Guadamuz’s research has shown that, of all pharmacies operating in the U.S. between 2010 and 2020, 29% closed by 2021 .
She attributes some closures to the market consolidating, such as Walgreens buying Rite Aid in the late 2010s, and others to the structure of PBMs.
As middlemen between pharmacies, drug manufacturers and insurance companies, PBMs negotiate pharmacy reimbursement costs of purchasing drugs and create preferred pharmacy networks.
Another study by Guadamuz found that independent pharmacies such as Durham Pharmacy are often excluded from these networks , making them almost twice as likely to close.
“If a pharmacy is excluded from a network or from a lot of networks, it’s more likely to close because they have less volume of patients coming in,” she said.
A 2024 report by the U.S.
Federal Trade Commission and subsequent lawsuits allege that PBMs overcharged health programs and reimbursed independent pharmacies at financially unsustainable rates.
Walter Douglass also believes many people who open independent pharmacies don’t realize how difficult they are to sustain, leading to closures after only two or three months.
When he and Carol aren’t serving customers in the store, they’re up late bookkeeping or filling out paperwork.
Sometimes they don’t get more than two hours of sleep, he said.
“If you don’t put everything into it, you’re not going to have people coming in,” Walter Douglass said.
“If you’re going to do it halfheartedly, you’ve got to have a big pocket to do that sort of thing.”
Durham Pharmacy sells notebooks and toys in the front store to keep the pharmacy in business, according to owner Walter Douglass.
Durham Pharmacy sells notebooks and toys in the front store to keep the pharmacy in business, according to owner Walter Douglass.
Credit: Julia Levine / CT Mirror
Tom Oravits has frequented Durham Pharmacy since moving to the town 30 years ago.
He said he practically lives in the store, picking up medication for his 83-year-old father and chatting with Walter Douglass several times a week.
“He’s like family to everybody,” Oravits said.
“With the bigger pharmacies, they’ll just cut you off and throw you out and say goodbye.
These folks, they take care of you.”
The front of the store serves as a gift shop, a UPS hub and a place to restock on home supplies.
Oravits can think of only two other pharmacies in Connecticut that are community-oriented and multipurpose — “old school,” he called it, noting that the store reminded him of the pharmacies he’d seen as a boy in the 1970s.
Eventually, he said, the chain pharmacies began copying the approach of mom-and-pop stores and buying them out.
“[Durham Pharmacy] is probably one of the last survivors that we got around here,” he said.
Walter Douglass said CVS and Price Chopper have tried to set up shop in Durham but faced resistance from residents.
If a chain pharmacy opens at a nearby university such as UConn, or the state government automatically places its workers on a plan run by a chain, he estimates the pharmacy side of the store loses a third of its customers.
Diversifying his business keeps the store afloat, and he said the front of the store pays most of the bills.
And unlike chains, which can tap into their own wholesaling arms, Walter Douglass relies on three small wholesalers to fill prescription requests.
He said he’ll sometimes spend 45 minutes searching for the right medication, only to come up empty.
“You’ve got to be open to the fact that you can’t always make it happen,” he said.
“But we’ll do whatever we have to do.”
Carol Douglass fills prescriptions at Durham Pharmacy in Durham on July 30.
Douglass is a pharmacist and operates the drug store with her husband, Walter Douglass.
Credit: Julia Levine / CT Mirror
In 2024, Connecticut’s state budget introduced tax abatement incentives for grocery stores that open in food deserts.
Though studies often compare pharmacy deserts to food deserts, Mathis doesn’t think the state can offer similar incentives to pharmacies due to the cost of maintaining them.
Opening a pharmacy costs between $250,000 and $1 million to account for safety, machinery and surveillance, not to mention the salaries for those with a medical education.
Guadamuz points to initiatives in other states as possible paths forward.
In Illinois and Oregon , pharmacies thought to be in areas with a high risk of closure receive higher reimbursement rates.
And, since 1963, North Dakota has upheld a law that allows only licensed pharmacists to own pharmacies.
A 2014 report by the Institute for Local Self-Reliance found that 53% of North Dakota’s rural census tracts had pharmacies, more than the national average.
On a civic level, Mathis thinks there’s potential for the state to find ways to uplift local pharmacy owners such as the Douglasses as “champions” of their communities.
“There’s an amazing amount of strength that comes from a community once they’re proud of something,” he said.
The Douglasses don’t see themselves leaving Durham Pharmacy any time soon.
They’d like to go on vacation, their first in seven years, but each day out of town means a day when community members can’t get their prescriptions.
And they’d like to retire by the end of the year and spend more time with their grandchildren, but they can’t see it happening.
Until they find a successor, they’ll continue running the store.
Walter Douglass said several people have come to him with offers to buy the store.
He’s turned down each of them, dissatisfied with what he viewed as their orientation toward profit rather than community.
“I’m still going to live in this town after I retire, and I want to be able to come to a pharmacy,” he said.
“If I have to work for a little while to help whoever buys it, I’d be willing.”
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