On January 11, 1964, the U.S. Surgeon General issued a report that definitively linked smoking cigarettes to a variety of ailments, including lung cancer and heart disease.
The report was a shot across the bow at the phony science that big tobacco companies had been funding and pushing to protect their deadly product. But even with the Surgeon General’s report, progress was initially slow. After all, nicotine is one of the most addictive drugs known to humanity.
In 1970, the large majority of American adults were still smokers. Today only 18% of American adults still smoke, though that translates to 44,000,000 people. And smoking remains the leading cause of preventable death in the United States, claiming over 440,000 lives each year.
During the 1990s, American society finally came to terms with the sickening realities of smoking, and began to issue serious regulations. Companies can no longer market to children, most advertising is outlawed, the product comes with strict warnings, and smoking has been made generally less accessible through heavy taxation and bans in many indoor places and public spaces.
But of course you can still buy cigarettes at gas stations, at convenience stores, at newspaper stands, and at . . . pharmacies, of all places.
Think about that one for a second.
You can go to a pharmacy, a place that specializes in healthcare, and purchase a highly addictive product that will continually degrade your health and has a good chance of eventually causing a horrific, fatal disease.
For the record, most small, local pharmacies do not sell tobacco products. However, some of the big chains do. Walgreen’s and CVS both sell cigarettes. So does Wal-Mart, which serves millions of Americans with its in-store pharmacies and health clinics.
There’s something profoundly unethical, if not morally corrupt, about a business model that makes people sicker while purporting to make them healthier. Retailers that sp
ecialize in healthcare while slinging nicotine on the side are indulging a particularly shameful brand of hypocrisy.
But come October, there will be one less corporate hypocrite among their ranks. That’s when, CVS has announced, it will stop selling tobacco products.
Why is CVS giving up $2 billion in revenue from cigarettes, chaw, and the like? Was it finally shamed into it?
Sort of. But not entirely.
The retail giant, which has 7,600 locations across the United States, is more than just a pharmacy. Its healthcare services also include a fast growing roster of in-store clinics. In addition to picking up medications, you can actually see a doctor for basic services. And this has created some discomfort at the same time it has created new economic opportunities.
CVS is now working directly with hospital groups and doctors to deliver healthcare in its stores. And many of those healthcare professionals are quite rightly wondering why they’re working with a corporate drug dealer.
CVS Chief Medical Officer Dr. Troyen A. Brennan said: “One of the first questions they ask us is, Well, if you’re going to be part of the health care system, how can you continue to sell tobacco products?”
He admitted that “There’s really no good answer to that at all.”
Publicly, CEO Larry Merlo is framing it as a decision based on ethics. “We’ve come to the conclusion that cigarettes have no place in a setting where health care is being delivered,” he said.
That’s right. Almost fifty years to the day after the U.S. Surgeon General report that definitively linked smoking to lung cancer and heart disease, CVS has finally decided that “cigarettes have no place in a setting where health care is being delivered.”
Talk about a slow learner.
Of course, the truth is that CVS hopes increased revenue from its in-store clinic will more than offset losses from tobacco sales. So getting cigarettes out of the stores will facilitate vital business relationship
s with healthcare professionals, while also allowing the company to pretend its top priority is patient health.
But if that were the case, it wouldn’t have taken CVS fifty years to do the right thing. It’s still about the Benjamins.
Either way, hopefully this will be a cue to other healthcare providers like Walgreen’s and Wal-Mart that they too should stop doubling as drug dealers.
Here’s hoping we don’t have to wait another half-century.