A Pack of Ammo and Pepto, Please

For recreation or rehabilitation, Stone Drug has your fix.

// Illustrations and Text by Emily Cohen

Keeping watch over the aisles of painkillers and toothpaste at Stone Drug is a dozen-strong collection of deer, elk, and bison mounts. Peek behind the curtain adorned with pin-up girls to the right of the pharmacy counter, and you’ll find an assortment of vibrators and bondage collars.

When Stone Drug opened in the new Grand Teton Plaza in July 1976, owner Jack Stone told the Jackson Hole News that it was as “complete a store as you will find in Jackson.” Located on the south side of Broadway, just one mile from the Town Square, Stone Drug ushered in a new era for Jackson. Residents no longer needed to drive two hours to Idaho Falls for affordable plumbing supplies or film processing. 

Stone Drug had it all: a coffee shop, records, electronics, Kodak and Polaroid cameras, garden supplies—and a pharmacy, of course.

Stone Drug had it all: a coffee shop, records, electronics, Kodak and Polaroid cameras, garden supplies—and a pharmacy, of course. Legend has it that National Lampoon even spoofed Stoner Drug. Err, Stone Drug.  

The first time that local fishing guide and newspaperman Paul Bruun saw a microwave was at Stone Drug. “All of sudden people were coming in and buying them like they were beef jerky,” Bruun says. He managed the sporting goods department for a couple of years after the store opened because he liked being around the gear. “I loved all the stuff they were selling—rifles, shotguns, ammo, fishing tackle,” he says. 

Nearly 50 years later, Stone Drug is still the place to get a fishing license and refill your beta blockers. Model rocket kits? Aisle 1. Coleman stoves? Aisle 2. Worms and mealworms are $4 in the refrigerator by the cash register. Sucker meat is $5. Off-brand perfumes are to the right when you walk in, next to Jackson Hole’s largest display of Burt’s Bees products. Customers like the “natural stuff,” says pharmacist and current owner Laura Lee Nelson.

Nelson started working at Stone Drug in 1979 as an intern after high school, but there was no job for her after graduating from college, so she went to Alaska for nearly three decades. She returned in 2010 to manage the pharmacy and bought the store in 2015—a shaky time to take over Wyoming’s oldest pharmacy. The year before, a Walgreens moved in across the street. “It was scary,” says Nelson about the direct competition from a national chain a few hundred feet away. But nature had her own plans. A landslide closed the Walgreens just three months after its opening. Starting on the hillside above the chain pharmacy, the landslide tore one family’s house in two and forced the evacuation of several businesses (in addition to Walgreens) and of about 60 people who lived in the immediate area of Budge Drive.

After the landslide, a Stone Drug customer made bumper stickers: Stone Drug: Won by a Landslide.
The stickers soon became collectors’ items, turning the natural disaster—and Stone Drug—into a
legend. A Walgreens executive even stopped in after touring the landslide to buy a Stone Drug souvenir. Now, more than a decade after the landslide, Nelson says she still get requests for the bumper stickers. 

Stone Drug is the only independent pharmacy in Jackson Hole and the oldest pharmacy in the state. Surviving decades of change, it remains a place for the community. Bruun says it’s easy for places to go corporate, but there’s a place and a need for the hometown store in a changing Jackson. “They are my pharmacy, and that’s the way it’s going to be,” he says. JH