When USC opened its newest pharmacy in South LA on Monday morning, Carolyn Williams was one of the first customers in the door.
The shopping center on the corner of Crenshaw Boulevard and Slauson Avenue previously housed a Rite Aid until its closure in March 2024, when the national chain was in the middle of bankruptcy issues.
“We needed something,” Williams said after finishing her shopping. “I’m so happy.”
The USC pharmacy opened for business officially on Monday, filling prescriptions and serving over-the-counter medications and medical supplies. A community medical clinic run by the nonprofit To Help Everyone Health and Wellness Centers will open in the space this summer, according to the nonprofit.
The new USC pharmacy is the school’s way of addressing what researchers say is a worsening shortage of pharmacies in Los Angeles and across the country. Rite Aid’s closure turned the area into what the researchers call a pharmacy desert, where limited access to medications corrodes a community’s health.
USC professor Dima Mazen Qato said studies have shown Americans living in pharmacy deserts are more likely to have worse cardiovascular health troubles and less likely to take the medications they need.
“Pharmacies provide a lot of essential services to the communities they serve,” Qato said. “When they’re not serving them, those communities suffer.”
In its first hours of operation, just a handful of customers filtered in and out of the pharmacy. Business is expected to pick up as locals learn about the pharmacy and transfer over prescriptions, according to Raffi Svadjian, USC’s executive director of community pharmacies.
Neighborhood locals Patrice and Terry Grissett were also among the first in the pharmacy on Monday. Regular walkers, they’d seen the pharmacy signs go up along with the posters for the official opening.
“I love it,” said Patrice Grissett. “It’s well needed.”
What is a pharmacy desert?
Researchers define pharmacy deserts differently in cities and rural areas.
By the standards of USC researchers, a low-income neighborhood with low vehicle ownership becomes a pharmacy desert when there is no pharmacy within half a mile. In urban neighborhoods with higher incomes and rates of car ownership, the threshold expands to a mile radius.
Researchers have found that Black communities are more likely to become pharmacy deserts than others, particularly white neighborhoods, according to Qato.
The progress of the problem is evident in the pharmacy desert tracker map the USC team re-launched in November. A 2010 version of the heatmap shows scattered pharmacy deserts across South LA, blooming into a series of dark pink masses by the time the data ends in 2024.
That map, Qato said, doesn’t even account for the Rite Aid closure.
USC’s South LA pharmacy was years in the making
Svadjian, the USC Pharmacies executive director, said the university’s pharmacy school had been trying to open an outpost in South LA for years before Rite Aid closed.
“Our goal is to see if we can close the pharmacy desert,” Svadjian said. “This became an opportunity. We jumped on it.”
The shopping center where the USC Pharmacy opened has seen a lot of recent turnover. Next door is a new Planet Fitness, housed in Rite Aid’s old digs. Across the parking lot is a Vallarta Supermarkets grocery store that replaced a shuttered Ralphs.
The newly opened pharmacy helps fill the void left by Rite Aid, but doesn’t address holes that have expanded in neighborhoods to the east, including Vermont Square and Westmont.
Qato, the researcher, said the new pharmacy is just a stopgap for an industry that has hit a recent rough patch.
“It shouldn’t require a philanthropic effort … to address a problem that was created by a system,” she said.
