KANSAS CITY, KANSAS - Physician Sharon Lee knows the embarrassment of buying condoms.
“I used to buy condoms myself, and it’s not an easy thing to do,” said Lee, director of Southwest Boulevard Family Health Care in Kansas City, Kan.
A drugstore can make that task more difficult if it places them in a locked case, forcing customers to ask for help. Extra embarrassment can lead to something worse than blushing cheeks or nervous sweat — it may discourage people from using condoms to protect themselves from HIV or other dangers, Lee said.
That thought worries the Rev. Eric Williams, too. That’s why his Calvary Community Outreach Network in Kansas City signed a national petition asking the CVS Caremark Corp. to unlock condoms in all CVS pharmacy stores.
Nationwide, more than 200 groups have signed on, including the Douglas County AIDS Project in Lawrence.
The petition, sponsored by the labor coalition Change to Win, said CVS stores tended to lock up condoms, especially in low-income neighborhoods with high numbers of minorities. This worries Williams, considering the higher rate of African-Americans with new HIV infections.
CVS said locking up condoms was a defense against shoplifters in stores where large numbers of condoms were stolen.
Williams said his group, a nonprofit arm of Calvary Temple Baptist Church, signed the petition because it wanted to do whatever was possible to stop the spread of HIV.
“When the house is on fire, you do everything you can to put the fire out,” Williams said.
The Kansas City Star visited 19 CVS stores across the Kansas City area and found that nine kept condoms locked away. Most packages of condoms in the locked cases were 12-packs costing $9 to $12.
In census tracts where CVS stores locked up condoms, an average of 25.9 percent of the population was below the poverty level, according to the 2000 U.S. Census. In tracts where the stores kept condoms unlocked, the poverty rate was 8 percent. (Across the country in 2000, the poverty rate was 9.2 percent.)
Nine of the stores were in census tracts with African-American populations higher than 12.3 percent, the U.S. average in 2000. All but one of them had locked-up condoms.
African-Americans account for about half of the people infected with HIV and AIDS, according to the Centers for Disease Control.
Williams pointed to other CDC findings that showed black women made up an especially large percentage of women with HIV and AIDS — 64 percent in 2005. Trends like that, he said, are why the church supports access to condoms as a barrier to HIV infection, even while upholding the ideal of abstinence until marriage.
“Let’s try to do everything we can to make sure our children, our wives, our grandmothers are safe,” Williams said.
One way to do this, he said, is for retailers to keep condoms out of locked boxes.
Mike DeAngelis, a CVS spokesman, said stores provided smaller, unlocked displays of packs with three condoms each, compared with boxes of 12 or more in the locked cases.
The Star found the smaller displays in all but two of the area stores with locked cases.
DeAngelis also said the group behind the condom petition, Change to Win, was mounting a smear campaign against CVS because of a labor dispute. Change to Win, which represents about 8,000 CVS employees, also has accused the company of overcharging customers and stocking expired merchandise.
Walgreens, CVS’ chief competitor among drugstore chains, said its corporate policy prohibited locking up condoms.
The Star checked Walgreens stores and found that, for the most part, they were abiding by that policy. The one exception: Some Walgreens keep one line of condoms — Trojan Magnums — under lock and key.
Lee, the Kansas City, Kan., physician, said she thought locking up condoms was a poor decision for a company’s image, as well as for the nation’s health. Any barrier to the use of condoms could lead to an increase in HIV and other sexually transmitted diseases, she said.
“We should, as a nation, be doing whatever we can to prevent further transmission, and this just sounds like a bad idea,” Lee said.
In her clinic, Lee sees about 600 patients infected with HIV.
Local agencies give away free condoms, including the Kansas City Health Department, the Kansas City Free Health Clinic and the Good Samaritan Project, a Kansas City organization that helps people infected with HIV and AIDS.
from The Kansas City Star
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