During the public discussion in the City Council about the drive through moratorium a year ago, in which I joined a dozen other people supporting the moratorium, CVS made the claim that the elderly and disabled needed drive through windows, Indeed, their Christmas Day lawsuit argues that CVS' power to insist upon a drive through window wherever they feel like putting one trumps the right of our City Government to ban drive through windows--and the carbon monoxide from idling engines, and traffic, and the endangerment of pedestrians, that a drive through would cause.
These seems to me to be ludicrous claims, and part of the astonishing rise of "Corporations are people" argument that form the legal foundation of CVS specious argument. By arguing that it is magically a person who is being discriminated against, CVS, with revenue of $123 billion last year, is claiming that our tiny city is violating CVS' civil right to unrestrained profits by refusing to grant them a permit for a new pharmacy that contains a drive through window.
During last year's public comments, not a single Sebastopol citizen spoke in favor of CVS having a drive through window. One Sebastopol senior after another got up and chastised CVS' slick San Francisco lawyer for suggesting that CVS somehow needed a drive through window because it cared about the elderly and disabled in our community.
At the time, I noted that if CVS wanted to help the elderly and disabled with their prescriptions, they could simply create a delivery service from their existing pharmacy location. This would allow homebound folks to have their doctors phone in their prescriptions and have them delivered. Pharmacies might compete for which on provided the better delivery service.
The reason there is a lawsuit instead of a delivery service is because CVS and its high priced mouthpieces don't give a rat's ass abut the elderly or disabled or any of us in our community. As I mentioned in the earlier post today and Monday, this is about the many cars driving through Sebastopol heading elsewhere, and CVS making their drug selling business "car friendly" to weekenders, Wine Country tourists, and out of towners. Neither CVS, nor any major drug dealing corporation, will build a new pharmacy without a drive through window. The big profits are in the pharmaceuticals, not in the toilet paper, and CVS owns one of the world's largest pharmaceutical distribution business.
This lawsuit is about CVS' "civil rights" to profit by polluting our downtown.
This is about CVS bogus, bully's "right" to tell our elected representatives what they can and cannot regulate.
This is about CVS' "civil right" to impose the most malignant element of car-convenient culture in the heart of one of the most successfully pedestrian downtowns of any small city in the United States.
This is about We, the living breathing, feeling people of Sebastopol, vs they, the soul-less, greed obsessed Corporation.
This is about our community rising up on behalf of our families , our neighbors , and our ecology.