For those of you who believe that all the promises being made my those seeking election/reelection and using that four letter “F” word  “FREE” quite freely… you need to get a copy of the book to the left – if still in print… It was co-authored by the co-chairman of the commission that Pres Regan created to tell the government to solve its long term financial problems. Of course, the final plan was shoved on some shelf and never looked at again.

A lot of what is outlined in the book …while is two decades late… we are – IMO – at the cusp of what is outlined in the book.

There is enough blame to go around for the extra 9-10 TRILLION dollar debt that has been amassed during the last 7.5 yrs… Our increased national debt during that period equals/greater to the debt out country amassed since 1776.  There has been one President and four different Congresses with 535 members who are all complicit and equally to blame.

The Senate didn’t pass a budget for 6-7 yrs… our country just spent money like we could just print more money as we needed it. The Federal Reserve has been complicit in this “drunken spending” by keeping the interest rate at near ZERO. Sooner or later that interest rate will have to return to its historic norm of 4% – 6%.  When this happens we will have abt ONE TRILLION annual interest bill to pay.

Currently our Federal Gov spends about FOUR TRILLION… which includes abt 400 billion in interest expense and exceeds our revenue by about 500 billion.

Kind of reminds me of a lot of kids that go off to college… get credit cards, max out the amount of money they can borrow – often in excess of what is needed for tuition/room/board.. uses the excess to pay the minimum payments on all the credit cards they have ran up. Then 6 months after graduation… the first payment comes due and the interest starts to apply.. and all too many find themselves with with too little income and too much out go.. and they end up back living in their parent’s house.

When the “chickens” come home to roost.. the Federal government has no “parent’s house” to go to… they only  have the money in the pockets of it citizens to help it pay its bills.

No matter which Presidential candidate promises new “FREE” something…  there is no money in the “piggy bank” to pay for it.

Even the promise of fixing our infrastructure to “create jobs”.. the only problem with this is once the road or bridge is fixed… what does the “newly employed” construction workers do for a income ?

Congress has stripped all the monies out of all the trust funds… mostly during the Bil Clinton Administration… how do you think that the government all of a sudden started showing annual budget surpluses ?

They put SS, Medicare, Medicare disability on a pay as you go basis. Unfortunately, the Medicare disability fund is near going into a 20% negative cash flow and the SS trust fund has about another 15 yrs before it goes into a negative cash flow…

Strangely enough, Pres Johnson started the Medicare/Medicaid program just as the baby boomers entered the work place and it will come up short just as the youngest baby boomer start entering retirement age.

Vote for whoever you want – things won’t change ! OMG !

This is a post from a couple of days ago, suggesting that the politicians that we elect are nothing but “puppets” for the “back room” non-elected regulators that really runs the entire governmental mess.

From that article it would seem that those that are impacting the chronic pain community the most (DEA,CDC,FDA) would seem to be part of that “back room governmental regulators” who only report to themselves.

Even “voting the bums out” … but.. the only recourse pts may end up having is suing those healthcare providers that abandon pts.

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Ward: Drug ‘war’ is over in rural areas

http://www.thestarpress.com/story/opinion/columnists/ward/2016/08/01/ward-drug-war-over-rural-areas/87001876/

The so-called war on drugs is over. Heroin has won.

No. That doesn’t mean heroin and other drug users can indulge their addiction with impunity. It means the problem is so big, so overwhelming, so pervasive that police officers are unable to make headway in a torrent of drugs, users and dealers.

Most of us picture heroin addicts as urban dwellers, unemployed, near the end of the line and living next to a Dumpster in some alley with a needle in their arm. That might be true for some who’ve hit rock bottom, but they are just as likely to be a white, 32-year-old male or female and living in a small town or rural region.

“That’s us,” Randolph County Sheriff Ken Hendrickson told a crowd at a forum hosted in June by the Indiana Youth Institute in Winchester. He knows what the drug culture is like, what drugs can do to the users and the families who must cope with the fallout of drug use. He lived and worked undercover as a narcotics officer before he was elected sheriff.  “I looked so bad when I was working … I couldn’t go to church. I couldn’t go to the local Walmart because I looked that bad.”

Maybe rural drug users can hold down a job, for awhile, or maybe they just bounce from house to house — with “friends” — in constant pursuit of their next high. They’ll turn to stealing or dealing to get the money to buy drugs.

Hendrickson speaks of the drug problem in rural settings. It’s taken years to get people to notice, he said. “Until the drug affects you and your family, you don’t care. But when it hits home and it’s your child — somebody in your family — you start to pay attention.”

The drug problem is getting noticed now, after a slow start.

Reach All Randolph County, formed about a year ago, so opioid and other drug users, including heroin, and others can seek help and start the treatment and recovery process.

Randolph County is not alone in the drug epidemic. Just about every corner of the nation is seeing more drug use. People who were prescribed opioid-based pain medications for chronic pain or to recover from surgeries found they couldn’t cope without the meds. When their supply dried up, they turned to heroin or other drugs, which are often cheaper than prescription medications.

And the problem is out of control.

Hendrickson said it’s a simple economic rule of supply and demand. “And the sad thing about heroin, they (users) love it. They hate the addiction, but they love the feel and the high.”

And that addiction can be powerful, and it prompts desperate measures.

For example, Randolph Superior Court Judge Pete Haviza said he’s had mothers in his court pleading with him to give their child a higher bond after an arrest in order to keep him or her away from the drugs and drug users. He said he takes their request under consideration, but he’s obligated to set reasonable bond limits.

In effect, putting addicts behind bars is becoming a treatment option where medical alternatives are few or non-existent. And if they do exist, often there’s a wait to receive treatment. Any officer will tell you it’s impossible to arrest your way out of the problem.

“We’re trying to manage the (drug problem) up here, Hendrickson said.  “We’re not going to stop it.” He displayed a map of the U.S. showing how drugs flow from Mexico. “You think me and 17 officers from the Randolph County Sheriff’s Department’s gonna stop it? When it went through 3,000 police officers before it even got here? We’re not going to stop it, but we can try to manage it as best we can.”

One part of managing the problem is Narcan, a drug that blocks the effects of opioids in overdose victims. Hendrickson credited Narcan with cutting the overdose deaths in the county from 16 last year to just three as of mid-June. “Narcan has been the life saver of Randolph County. No doubt in my mind.” Hendrickson said.

If it’s administered in time. All public safety departments in the county have access to it, but help can be a long way off in some parts of the county because of its size.

So law enforcement, firefighters and EMTs have become the front line in drug treatment.

Until rural counties such as Randolph can scrounge the resources and money to provide treatment options, there’s little that can be done. A “drug court” would help free up other courts to deal with other criminal cases, which can sometimes stretch to years of court activity because of the backlog. Paying for such a court is another matter.

And even if such a court could be formed, many addicts return to using, despite treatment. One idea worth trying might be to follow the lead in Wayne County and start a pretrial-diversion program for drug users — get approved treatment or go to jail. Successful treatment results in a dismissed case. Failure to complete treatment means prosecution.

It’s a carrot-and-stick approach, but it might steer some people into treatment who would otherwise avoid it, and it might clear court dockets.

That’s a lot of “mights” but what alternative is there? If anyone has ideas, let’s hear them.

Managing the problem is not solving it.

Jeff Ward is a news columnist for The Star Press. Email him at jward@muncie.gannett.com with tips, suggestions or story ideas

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What physicians are saying about the new CDC opioid guidelines

http://www.ama-assn.org/ama/ama-wire/post/physicians-saying-new-cdc-opioid-guidelines

Officials at the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) Tuesday released clinical guidelines for prescribing opioids to help combat the nation’s overdose epidemic, and physicians were swift to respond. Physicians are embracing the concepts for reducing harm but simultaneously are pointing out serious shortcomings that will need to be addressed.

What’s in the guidelines

The guidelines, which were published in JAMA and on the CDC website, are intended for primary care clinicians who treat adult patients for chronic pain in outpatient settings. Their main goals are to help physicians improve communication with their patients about the benefits and risks of using prescription opioids for chronic pain, provide safer and more effective care for chronic pain, and reduce opioid use disorder and overdose among their patients.

The guidelines are intended to be a “flexible tool” to support informed decision-making, improve physicians’ confidence about how to manage chronic pain, and promote safer and more effective options for pain management, CDC Director Tom Frieden, MD, said on a media call Tuesday.

The guidelines include 12 clinical recommendations, which are centered on three principles for improving patient care and safety:

• Nonopioid therapy—including physical therapy, exercise, nonopioid medications and cognitive behavioral therapy—is preferred for chronic pain management (excluding active cancer, palliative and end-of-life care).
• If opioids are prescribed, they should be at the lowest possible effective dosage to reduce the risks of opioid use disorder and overdose.
• If opioids are prescribed, physicians should exercise caution and monitor the patient closely. Steps include consulting their state’s prescription drug monitoring program and tapering opioids if the desired effect is not achieved.

Three of the recommendations cover how to determine when to initiate or continue opioids for chronic pain. Four recommendations help physicians make decisions about opioid selection, dosage, duration, follow up and discontinuation. And five recommendations deal with assessing risk and addressing harms.

Physicians’ responses

Following release of the guidelines, Patrice A. Harris, MD, the AMA board chair-elect and chair of the AMA Task Force to Reduce Opioid Abuse, noted that the AMA was “largely supportive of the guidelines” and noted the AMA’s shared goal of reducing harm from opioid abuse and seeking solutions to end the public health epidemic. 

But Dr. Harris highlighted several concerns that remained from the draft guidelines on which the AMA submitted comments. “We remain concerned about the evidence base informing some of the recommendations; conflicts with existing state laws and product labeling; and possible unintended consequences associated with implementation, which includes access and insurance coverage limitations for non-pharmacologic treatments, especially comprehensive care; and the potential effects of strict dosage and duration limits on patient care,” she said.

“We know this is a difficult issue and doesn’t have easy solutions,” Dr. Harris said. “If these guidelines help reduce the deaths resulting from opioids, they will prove to be valuable. If they produce unintended consequences, we will need to mitigate them. They are not the final word. More needs to be done, and we plan to continue working at the state and federal level to engage policy makers to take steps that will help end this epidemic.”

In conjunction with release of the guidelines, the JAMA Network published several perspectives from prominent physicians. 

“The CDC guideline for prescribing opioids for chronic pain is an important and essential step forward,” Yngvild Olsen, MD, of the Institutes for Behavior Resources Inc., wrote in a JAMA editorial. “With support from physicians across the country, as well as from policymakers at all levels, implementation of the recommendations in this guideline has the potential to improve and save many, many lives.” 

But Dr. Olsen underscored that “success depends on simultaneously addressing significant gaps in the health care system.” These include “enormous gaps in reimbursement, both for chronic pain and for addiction treatment” and “few available care models that give primary care practitioners the time, resources and support to care for patients with complex chronic pain at risk for or with addiction.”

Noting a lack of evidence for the benefit of long-term use of opioids, Mitchell Katz, MD, of the Los Angeles County Department of Health Services, wrote in an editorial in JAMA Internal Medicine that the guidelines “have done an admirable job of summarizing our ignorance and putting forth 12 sensible recommendations, none of which meets a rigorous standard of evidence but all of which, if implemented, would reduce harm and likely improve chronic pain control in the United States.” Dr. Katz was a member of the Opioid Guideline Workgroup that reviewed the recommendation categories and level of evidence for these guidelines. 

William Renthal, MD, of the Department of Neurology at Brigham and Women’s Hospital of Harvard Medical School, also highlighted the lack of clinical evidence in an editorial in JAMA Neurology: “[T]here are few well-controlled clinical studies on opioid-prescribing methods for chronic pain. While the guidelines will be updated as new data become available, concerns may be raised that appropriate access to opioids could be negatively affected by federal guidelines based on admittedly weak data.”

But Dr. Renthal noted the prudent principles of the guidelines. “It is important to note that the CDC guidelines are in this respect, an iteration of well-accepted medical principles of drug prescribing: to use the lowest effective dose for the shortest possible duration,” he wrote. 

An editorial in JAMA Pediatrics by Neil L. Schechter, MD, of Boston Children’s Hospital, and Gary A. Walco, PhD, of Seattle Children’s Hospital, highlights the exclusion of children from the guidelines. “The CDC guideline is now published, without regard for pediatric patients,” they wrote. They called for greater clarification that the guidelines should not be applied to those younger than 18 years of age and recommended the development of future guidelines specifically for addressing indications and safety concerns for pediatric patients. 

Thomas Lee, MD, of Press Ganey, reflected on the overall opioids situation in his JAMA editorial: “The data will never be perfect. The measures will never be perfect. The guidelines will never be perfect. And neither will clinicians and their performance. But by acknowledging these imperfections and trying to get better with the tools available, physicians can more effectively reduce the suffering of patients.”

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New US law stymies efforts to control opioids

http://www.newsobserver.com/opinion/editorials/article93159532.html

Congresswoman Judy Chu, a California Democrat, co-sponsored a bill in the U.S. House that met no significant opposition in either her chamber or the U.S. Senate. The new law makes it harder for the government to go after pharmaceutical companies and drug stores that do not report suspicious orders of opioids such as oxycodone and hydrocodone, powerful painkillers.

Before this law, the Drug Enforcement Administration could shut down companies and doctors if the agency determined there was an “imminent danger” to the public. Now, the standard is higher, defining the danger as “substantial likelihood of an immediate threat” of death. And those companies that stand accused of failing to report suspiciously large orders of the drugs now can can submit a “corrective action plan” and avoid punishment by the DEA.

The Los Angeles Times reports that the top DEA administrator for the regulation of pharmaceutical companies resigned last fall in protest of the bill.

Chu, by the way, has gotten more than $31,000 in contributions from the pharmaceutical industry. She had no comment for the Times.

This is an appalling bow to the powerful pharmaceutical industry, with billions of dollars at stake and millions to spend on powerful lobbyists. And it could not have come at a worse time.

Opioid abuse is a public health menace. Nearly 200,000 people have died since 1999 from overdoses involving opioid painkillers. In North Carolina, the figure is 1,000 deaths – each year. And state health officials report that is a more than 300 percent increase. Abuse of the drugs has, The Times reports, been linked to a destructive and deadly surge in heroin use.

The new law means that alarms sound for companies only after the DEA makes accusations. What should happen, of course, is the creation of a regulatory system offering severe punishments for companies that don’t closely monitor, and regularly report, suspicious orders – unusually large ones, for example.

The fact that there is a serious black market for opioids is a tremendous problem.

The companies that manufacture them aren’t being asked to go out of business; they’re being told to be responsible to the public and to do their duty. That isn’t too much to ask. Congress should revisit this unfortunate and irresponsible law as soon as possible.

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Authorities organize new, unified effort to end opioid epidemic in Pittsburgh

http://www.wpxi.com/web/wpxi/news/law-enforcement-organize-new-unified-effort-to-end-opioid-epidemic-in-pittsburgh/296144726

PITTSBURGH —

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Vote all you want. The secret government won’t change.

The people we elect aren’t the ones calling the shots, says Tufts University’s Michael Glennon

The voters who put Barack Obama in office expected some big changes. From the NSA’s warrantless wiretapping to Guantanamo Bay to the Patriot Act, candidate Obama was a defender of civil liberties and privacy, promising a dramatically different approach from his predecessor.

But six years into his administration, the Obama version of national security looks almost indistinguishable from the one he inherited. Guantanamo Bay remains open. The NSA has, if anything, become more aggressive in monitoring Americans. Drone strikes have escalated. Most recently it was reported that the same president who won a Nobel Prize in part for promoting nuclear disarmament is spending up to $1 trillion modernizing and revitalizing America’s nuclear weapons.

Why did the face in the Oval Office change but the policies remain the same? Critics tend to focus on Obama himself, a leader who perhaps has shifted with politics to take a harder line. But Tufts University political scientist Michael J. Glennon has a more pessimistic answer: Obama couldn’t have changed policies much even if he tried.

Though it’s a bedrock American principle that citizens can steer their own government by electing new officials, Glennon suggests that in practice, much of our government no longer works that way. In a new book, “National Security and Double Government,” he catalogs the ways that the defense and national security apparatus is effectively self-governing, with virtually no accountability, transparency, or checks and balances of any kind. He uses the term “double government”: There’s the one we elect, and then there’s the one behind it, steering huge swaths of policy almost unchecked. Elected officials end up serving as mere cover for the real decisions made by the bureaucracy.

Glennon cites the example of Obama and his team being shocked and angry to discover upon taking office that the military gave them only two options for the war in Afghanistan: The United States could add more troops, or the United States could add a lot more troops. Hemmed in, Obama added 30,000 more troops.

Glennon’s critique sounds like an outsider’s take, even a radical one. In fact, he is the quintessential insider: He was legal counsel to the Senate Foreign Relations Committee and a consultant to various congressional committees, as well as to the State Department. “National Security and Double Government” comes favorably blurbed by former members of the Defense Department, State Department, White House, and even the CIA. And he’s not a conspiracy theorist: Rather, he sees the problem as one of “smart, hard-working, public-spirited people acting in good faith who are responding to systemic incentives”—without any meaningful oversight to rein them in.

How exactly has double government taken hold? And what can be done about it? Glennon spoke with Ideas from his office at Tufts’ Fletcher School of Law and Diplomacy. This interview has been condensed and edited.

IDEAS: Where does the term “double government” come from?

GLENNON:It comes from Walter Bagehot’s famous theory, unveiled in the 1860s. Bagehot was the scholar who presided over the birth of the Economist magazine—they still have a column named after him. Bagehot tried to explain in his book “The English Constitution” how the British government worked. He suggested that there are two sets of institutions. There are the “dignified institutions,” the monarchy and the House of Lords, which people erroneously believed ran the government. But he suggested that there was in reality a second set of institutions, which he referred to as the “efficient institutions,” that actually set governmental policy. And those were the House of Commons, the prime minister, and the British cabinet.

IDEAS: What evidence exists for saying America has a double government?

GLENNON:I was curious why a president such as Barack Obama would embrace the very same national security and counterterrorism policies that he campaigned eloquently against. Why would that president continue those same policies in case after case after case? I initially wrote it based on my own experience and personal knowledge and conversations with dozens of individuals in the military, law enforcement, and intelligence agencies of our government, as well as, of course, officeholders on Capitol Hill and in the courts. And the documented evidence in the book is substantial—there are 800 footnotes in the book.

IDEAS: Why would policy makers hand over the national-security keys to unelected officials?

GLENNON: It hasn’t been a conscious decision….Members of Congress are generalists and need to defer to experts within the national security realm, as elsewhere. They are particularly concerned about being caught out on a limb having made a wrong judgment about national security and tend, therefore, to defer to experts, who tend to exaggerate threats. The courts similarly tend to defer to the expertise of the network that defines national security policy.

The presidency itself is not a top-down institution, as many people in the public believe, headed by a president who gives orders and causes the bureaucracy to click its heels and salute. National security policy actually bubbles up from within the bureaucracy. Many of the more controversial policies, from the mining of Nicaragua’s harbors to the NSA surveillance program, originated within the bureaucracy. John Kerry was not exaggerating when he said that some of those programs are “on autopilot.”

IDEAS: Isn’t this just another way of saying that big bureaucracies are difficult to change?

GLENNON: It’s much more serious than that. These particular bureaucracies don’t set truck widths or determine railroad freight rates. They make nerve-center security decisions that in a democracy can be irreversible, that can close down the marketplace of ideas, and can result in some very dire consequences.

IDEAS: Couldn’t Obama’s national-security decisions just result from the difference in vantage point between being a campaigner and being the commander-in-chief, responsible for 320 million lives?

GLENNON: There is an element of what you described. There is not only one explanation or one cause for the amazing continuity of American national security policy. But obviously there is something else going on when policy after policy after policy all continue virtually the same way that they were in the George W. Bush administration.

IDEAS: This isn’t how we’re taught to think of the American political system.

GLENNON: I think the American people are deluded, as Bagehot explained about the British population, that the institutions that provide the public face actually set American national security policy. They believe that when they vote for a president or member of Congress or succeed in bringing a case before the courts, that policy is going to change. Now, there are many counter-examples in which these branches do affect policy, as Bagehot predicted there would be. But the larger picture is still true—policy by and large in the national security realm is made by the concealed institutions.

IDEAS: Do we have any hope of fixing the problem?

GLENNON: The ultimate problem is the pervasive political ignorance on the part of the American people. And indifference to the threat that is emerging from these concealed institutions. That is where the energy for reform has to come from: the American people. Not from government. Government is very much the problem here. The people have to take the bull by the horns. And that’s a very difficult thing to do, because the ignorance is in many ways rational. There is very little profit to be had in learning about, and being active about, problems that you can’t affect, policies that you can’t change.

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TMA Board of Councilors Current Opinions

https://www.texmed.org/CurrentOpinions/

ABANDONMENT. The unilateral severance by the physician of the patient-physician relationship without providing an adequate medical attendant or reasonable notice under existing circumstances of the physician’s intent to terminate the patient-physician relationship is abandonment and is unethical. (April. 2003)

COVERAGE OF PRACTICE. Following establishment of a patient-physician relationship, the physician remains responsible for the care of that patient until such time as the patient-physician relationship is ended in a proper and legal manner. It is recommended that a physician provide appropriate care and when a physician is unavailable, communicate to the patient an alternative for care.

DUTY TO DEAL HONESTLY WITH PATIENTS. It is a fundamental ethical requirement that a physician should at all times deal honestly and openly with patients. Patients have a right to know their past and present medical status and to be free of any mistaken beliefs concerning their conditions. Situations occasionally occur in which a patient suffers significant medical complications. In these situations, the physician is ethically required to inform the patient of all the facts necessary to ensure understanding of what has occurred. Only through full disclosure is a patient able to make informed discussions regarding future medical care.

Ethical responsibility includes informing patients of changes in their diagnosis resulting from retrospective review of test results or any other information. This obligation holds even though the patient’s medical treatment or therapeutic options may not be altered by the new information.

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North Carolina voter ID law struck down as ‘discriminatory’ by federal court

The US attorney general, Loretta Lynch, applauded the ruling. Such voting restrictions, she said in a statement, “sent a message that contradicted some of the most basic principles of our democracy”.

She added: “The ability of Americans to have a voice in the direction of their country – to have a fair and free opportunity to help write the story of this nation – is fundamental to who we are and who we aspire to be.”

https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2016/jul/29/north-carolina-voter-id-law-struck-down?

You can read the rest of the article … IMO.. it is a bunch of political posturing between the two political parties. Can you imagine that the courts have struck down the a person… in order to vote who is representing us in various political position … has to show a valid ID.

If you want to purchase a controlled Rx – you must show a driver’s license

If you wish to purchase tags for your car – you must show a driver’s license

If you wish to purchase insurance for your car – you must show a driver’s license

If you are going to fly commercially – you must show a driver’s license

If you want to write a personal check for a purchase – you mush show a driver’s license

If a cop stops you for a traffic stop – you must show a driver’s license

If you want to purchase a cell phone – you must show a driver’s license

I am sure that many of my readers can think of a dozen or more incidents of the need for a driver’s license

What would prevent a group of people could generate fake driver’s license with different names and addresses and on election day go from voting site to voting site and “stuff the ballot box” with votes for a particular candidate. Otherwise know as VOTER FRAUD…

Most states will issue a “state ID card” … it will look like a driver’s license.. but .. is just a state ID.

Those in the chronic pain community should take AG Lynch’s words to heart… who we are and who we aspire to be.

Congress works on a TWO YEAR session.. so that means that since the Controlled Substance Act 1970 was passed… started the war on drugs… we have had 23 Congressional sessions since then..  we have had <D> and <R> Presidents and <D> & <R> majority House/Senate and Congress as a whole..

What has changed for the better or for the worse ?

The war on drugs was ramp up during the 2009-2011 period to focus more on pts, doc, pharmacies, wholesalers… opiate Rxs peaked in 2012… but the DEA changed the scheduling of Vicodin type products in 2014 and OD continue to rise.. so the CDC implemented new guidelines on opiate dosing in 2016.. which is causing more pts to be denied .. and we can only look forward to more “tightening of the screws” in 2018 as OD’s continue to climb.  IMO.. we are having to deal with a bunch of  “brain dead” bureaucrats that are not smart enough that the cause & effect that they have believed to be going on..  which appears that they are DEAD WRONG… They are apparently listening to certain individuals and/or groups that has an profit agenda in treating substance abusers and/or turn chronic pain pts into pts with a “opiate use disorder” and in need of participating in their program.

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I was just at my neighborhood CVS on Glenwood Rd in Decatur Ga, and am completely floored at what I found out. I went in to buy sunscreen for an outing at a lake tomorrow. After searching high and low for sunscreen, I went up front and asked the cashier where it was. To my surprise, I was told that your company was no longer sending sunscreen to this particular store…when I asked why, I was told because this part of the area doesn’t need or use sunscreen… I live in a predominantly African American area…but I am Caucasian. I’m not sure you are aware that black people’s skin burns just like us white folks. In fact the cashier I was talking to (who is black) lost her uncle to skin cancer. I find this quite disturbing…I applaud you for no longer selling cigarettes because of cancer, but it sure seems stupid on your part to not sell sunscreen, which helps to protect against cancer. I’m sure this will just be put at the bottom of your list, but it’s ridiculous in my books. I hope this changes…I shouldn’t have to go the the “white part” of town to buy a product from your company.
Unhappy consumer,

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