CVS Health Quits U.S. Chamber Over Stance on Smoking
nytimes.com
nytimes.com
And what a horrible shame on the U.S. Chamber of Commerce. I'm so sick of the idea of the dollar above all else. Cigarettes kill people. That's it. Deciding it's ok to not only sell these death sticks, but actively fight against the championing of healthier living and longer lives is absolutely, totally, and completely shameful.
https://industrydocuments.library.ucsf.edu/tobacco/
I once happened to meet a researcher who spent some time with the data set and they had all sorts of horrific stories about how consciously evil the cigarette companies were. The one that sticks with me is the people planning marketing campaigns for mentally handicapped adults. I had no words. I still don't, really.
It's about 18min long, but well worth it: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6UsHHOCH4q8
They've responded to a shrinking market in the US and other highly developed nations, by doubling down on their efforts to sell to everyone in the rest of the world. And woe to the country with a smaller GDP than Phillip Morris who decides to try to put restrictions on a pack of smokes.
It's going to pass.
That's not it. Cigarettes also bring a large amount of pleasure to people. If you think that doesn't matter, replace it with candy bars, or any food that isn't part of the healthiest possible diet.
I generally think everyone should be allowed to do whatever they want to themselves, as long as they're not being influenced by others in a way they can't control or are not fully aware of, which is what advertising and marketing generally is.
When you add in underlying physiological effects like chemical addiction to nicotine and sugar (and an ignorance of), this is clearly a case where individuals freedom and security is being infringed upon.
When the day comes that we can structure our society such that might does not make right, I'll agree with you, we should relax our laws and encourage more a more libertarian outlook. Until then, centers of power and capital need to be constrained by our legal system to protect the vulnerable.
Most people put themselves firmly in a pro- or anti- legalization camp, but in reality there are major problems (and solved problems) with both approaches.
Fully legalize and you'll encounter this horrible scenario where big companies emerge to profit off addictions. They'll lobby governments domestically and abroad. They'll engage in all kinds of shady practices to protect their businesses, just as cigarette companies have. (the oft-proposed solution to the flawed status quo)
Don't legalize and you'll miss many opportunities to help addicts, allow the black market to continue, etc. All the things you're already familiar with. (the status quo)
It's complicated.
As an example, the park nearest my house has a guy who comes by occasionally on some busy weekends to sell pot truffles. I'm sure he makes a modest living, but I have no worry about people getting dangerously hooked. If we were to let Coca Cola put the cocaine back in, though? Or to let 7-11 sell hash and crack, with prominent placards outside and a billion-dollar ad budget? No thanks.
My other half-serious plan is for licensing. Imagine that to be able to legally buy and take LSD, you have to take a 12-week class with practical exams where you drop acid with your instructor. I can think of no better way to remove the appealing mystique of drugs than to make kids turn up after school every Wednesday for a semester and have some teacher drone at them about mechanisms of action and key safety considerations.
Have we ever seen that play out for hard drugs, when capitalism is also allowed to work on treatment and rehab?
It would be different if smoking only affected the smoker, but as it affects the wider population (such as higher overall health care premiums), it deserves stricter controls.
And the "collective cost" argument is silly, because it can be applied to any personal liberty that negatively affects health.
http://www.forbes.com/sites/danielfisher/2013/12/12/study-fi...
1) From your link, "The study doesn’t cover the many other ill effects of breathing somebody else’s cigarette smoke, of course, which include asthma and possibly cardio-pulmonary disease." So not debunked exactly.
2) Penn & Teller are entertainers (and illusionists). They present controversial opinions for the sake of a TV show. It is not journalism and shouldn't be accepted at face value.
ETA: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Penn_%26_Teller:_Bullshit!
Penn says, "right now, as I sit here, there probably is danger in secondhand smoke".
www.youtube.com/watch?v=3s8yqj3EL7A
Asthma sufferers, for example, have all sorts of additional breathing difficulties when forced to breathe smoke (of any kind).
Heart disease is a bigger killer than cancer in many countries.
Plenty of non smokers also get cancer.
A tobacco addiction works by screwing with your brain's ability to perceive pleasure. The result is that most cigarette smokers do not get pleasure added to their lives by tobacco. It's just that they need to keep smoking just to keep getting themselves back up to feeling normal.
With the amount of caffeine addicts in the world I'm surprised at the hostility towards nicotine.
Similarly, people are much more against caffeine in the form of sugary energy drinks than caffeine in the form of tea, because energy drinks are bad for you while tea is moderately good for you on the whole.
One of the more interesting bits of trivia about nicotine and caffeine is it is the mode of delivery that makes nicotine so addictive. If you smoked caffeine it would be as addictive as nicotine. Given we now have vaping it should be possible to smoke caffeine - I haven’t looked, but I would not be surprised if someone out there is selling smokable caffeine.
Yes, but it's worth noting that the increased risk of heart disease from smoking is due to more than just nicotine.
It in not only smoke that is harmful as people who chew tobacco suffer an increase in mouth cancer. While vaping should have a lower risk than smoking, it is not risk free. Since it is so new we won’t know for sometime how dangerous it is.
Of course that selfish harmful-to-others behaviour is going to attract condemnation.
I'm a smoker myself (quit a few times, for periods up to a year, I will quit again, but damn that addiction is going to chase me for life).
I'm not "vehemently" opposed to e-cigs, but I don't like them either. When they first appeared, I saw a few friends switch to e-cigs, and considered perhaps getting one for myself. But after a week or two, every single one of them "cheated" and occasionally smoked a real cigarette, citing that it just wasn't really the same. By now, nearly all of them have switched back to smoking real cigarettes.
Then I realized, e-cigs just keep the cravings and addiction going. I knew I wanted to quit, and quit for real. For me personally, from experience, only the first week or so of quitting is the hardest, after that the craving subsides (for some people this takes longer). Then comes the period where you're really happy you're no longer a smoker, feel cleaner, smell more things (not always good, but very worth it, and sign of progress). Then comes the long stretch where you just need to never, ever smoke a cigarette again, for the rest of your life. Because even just smoking one, after half a year, weakens that resolve, and I should consider myself "on notice" for at least a couple of weeks, because the threshold for smoking another one becomes so much lower, and before you know I'm back at step 0. It's (for me) not particularly hard on the day-by-day basis, it's the part that you can't ever give in to it again, for the rest of your life, that makes it hard to keep up.
That's why I don't like e-cigs. For someone who is really addicted, it just keeps the door open to fall back to regular cigarettes any time, because you don't do anything about the habit and nicotine addiction, you just make it less unhealthy as long as you stick to e-cigs only.
The only positive thing I have gained from smoking, is learning what addiction really means, therefore understanding other people's addictions better, and decidedly staying away from other addictive substances.
When caffeine contains the above and my act of consumption means others also inhale those chemicals (SHS) then I'll care about caffeine as much as I do tobacco smoke.
Are you meaning to suggest that they have the same pharmacokinetics, or similar acute or chronic use symptoms?
I feel as though the addiction springs from the person and not the drug, just as some people are addicted to gambling or facebook or video games. Some people just get addicted to anything that once gave them a positive emotion.
Edit: well you edited your comment twice since my reply, so I'll be right back with some information for you.
Overall synopsis: http://www.drugabuse.gov/publications/drugfacts/cigarettes-o...
Mainstream overview: http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2014/01/17/cigarettes-more-add...
> Nicotine is a drug found naturally in tobacco, which is as addictive as heroin or cocaine: http://www.cancer.org/cancer/cancercauses/tobaccocancer/ques...
Onset of addiction: http://abcnews.go.com/Health/story?id=117976
Finally, understanding addiction of nicotine: https://tobacco.ucsf.edu/content/featured-study-understandin...
I experienced zero addiction for the first three months, and even after the full two years addiction was mild. I reduced my dose gradually over two weeks. There were no physical withdrawal symptoms, and only minor craving which went away after a few months abstinence. I'm no expert on heroin addiction, but I find it hard to believe it's equal to nicotine. Perhaps whole tobacco would be different.
It springs from the interaction between the two; different drugs have different addictive qualities, different people have different susceptibilities to those addictive qualities. Individual extreme outliers -- in both the more easily addicted and less easily addicted directions -- for any particular drug are to be expected, and don't disprove the general feature.
The only people who claim that are ones who haven't been addicted to cigarettes :-)
If you're only smoking once a month, the nicotine isn't building up enough to make withdrawal a problem. I'm not even sure there's enough nicotine in one cigarette that you would notice any withdrawal symptoms. And in a month, the nicotine from the previous cigarette is long gone.
Besides that, the hardest part of quitting is getting rid of the habits around it, and if you're only smoking once a month, you're not forming any habits. Try smoking a cigarette with your coffee first thing every morning for 6 months, and see if you still believe it's not addictive :-/
That said, I'm sure the strength of the effect can vary from person to person.
I do agree with you that the occasional cigarette can be very pleasurable.
This is where the whole "cold turkey" thing comes from and why quitting is so difficult for so many people
If you want to do something disgusting do it in private.
http://www.forbes.com/sites/danielfisher/2013/12/12/study-fi...
I find it disingenuous to vilify cigarettes and smoking when alcohol is considered not just okay but popular and socially acceptable. In social routines, as a non-drinker, I am an outlier.
Neither alcohol or cigarette smoking appeal to me. I personally find being around a smoker to be slightly more annoying than being around drunkards. But neither is pleasant.
Still, although I personally wouldn't be directly affected by alcohol prohibition, I am glad that I didn't live during the United States' experimentation with prohibition and I don't want alcohol prohibition today. Similarly, I don't particularly like the current prohibition of narcotics due to secondary effects. I also don't like where things are with tobacco—wherein smokers are essentially painted as evil or weak, and certainly not partaking in a habit they actually enjoy.
Obesity through junk food is a problem as well. It's being addressed separately.
Is that true? How many "social smokers" are there? I ask, because I do not know.
And, as the Surgeon General made clear:
http://www.theonion.com/video/surgeon-general-smoking-fine-a...
I quit nearly cold turkey (one month ramp down) and didn't touch one for about a decade. A few years ago I went through a "social smoking" phase for a few months where I'd bum a couple while out drinking, or during the day here and there. Maybe totaled like ten cigs a week or so.
There is a huuuuge difference. Social smoking is real.
Now no one smokes, but we have an obesity/diabetes epidemic, and people bring in homemade cookies or brownies every day.
I can just imagine the uproar if anyone proposed a sugar free office though.
Should we mandate showers too? I've known some people who didn't practice proper hygiene and had a rather repulsive smell. Maybe we should forcibly scrub them down.
I can and do limit my sugar intake but for a treat once in awhile I'll buy one of those extremely expensive yet extremely tasty imported dark chocolate bars and eat one little square as treat per day for a long while. I bet if I ate the whole bar in one sitting I could reignite my sugar cravings, but its just a gram or so of carbs so I'm good.
The counterexamples are I suppose e-cig vape people could just sniff the bottle, or people who drink one unit of soda no matter if its a 6 oz mini can or 64 oz giant cup.
Given the tobacco companies have historically been guilty of pretty much every evil known to mankind I would not be surprised to discover the "unit size cigarette" is at least partially constrained geometrically to maximize addiction, and a smaller or larger dose would result in lower addiction rates.
There might be a maximal addiction dosage of dark chocolate, but non-unit consumption of candy bars is so normal that it might not work as an addiction strategy.
The Chamber is pro heroin. Sounds nonsensical, doesn't it?
Of course things are more nuanced, when it comes down to the matter of lifestyle and individual choice.
But it's kind of beside the main point. Which is: when it comes to their tireless efforts to tear down nearly any reasonable safeguards (whether in the form of health warnings on packaging, or access to minors) -- and especially the extent to which they resort to FUD and blatant anti-intellectualism to achieve these ends -- the tobacco lobby simply has no case.
But I disagree. Free speech and the right to vote protections were given to individuals as basic human rights, and corporations are not people. More money should not equal more voting or lobbying power. I realize that is impossible to avoid entirely. Still, the more we let stuff like this happen, the more we dilute the value of our individual democratic rights.
Cigarette makers shouldn't be allowed to lie about their product or mislead the public, but I believe they should still be allowed to sell it. Freedom means having the ability to do something that other people disapprove of or even to do things that are self-destructive, so long as they don't directly harm others. I hate cigarettes but I would not support a legal prohibition against them.
What is second-hand smoke for $300, Jim?
E:
I say this as someone who suffered a SHS-induced asthma attack that nearly killed me when I was 6 years old. That incident got my father to quit smoking cold-turkey. Smoking can directly harm others and second-hand smoke can travel and affect those around the smoker.
Unless the point is that SHS is "indirect" harm. In which case I argue that releasing mustard gas is "indirect" harm.
1 out of 10 smoking-related deaths are non-smokers [0]. We can demonstrate it causes harm to other people and it fails to follow the criteria of "it shouldn't cause direct harm to others".
[0] http://www.cancer.org/cancer/cancercauses/tobaccocancer/seco...
The burning end of the cigarette? That smoke trail is SHS, as is the smoke that the smoker exhales. The exhaled smoke isn't as harmful as the burning cigarette.
People are exposed to larger amounts of SHS in enclosed places that traps the SHS inside. You don't have to smoke to create SHS, you merely have to light a cigarette.
How much and how concentrated SHS needs to be to be considered harmful is another story. Are designated smoking areas enough? How much distance does there need to be to let the smoke dissipate into smaller amounts and be less harmful?
I don't know the answers to the above questions - and I'm not going to trust any study funded by a tobacco company.
As long as the public is well informed, I'm strongly in favor of allowing individuals to make their own choices. The cult of anti-smoking needs to come to an end. The second-hand smoke nuisance has been eliminated in public places, and nobody reasonable has any question about the overall health effects of cigarettes. It's time to let people make their own choices.
I suspect this is not necessarily the case in countries with less public health education, especially developing or poor countries which is where Tobacco has shifted its efforts to grow or maintain revenue.
there's an external dialogue though, for sure... "it's more/less bad than you think"
Reduced, but not eliminated. People still smoke in far too many public spaces in the US. Try standing at the curb outside baggage claim at SFO or SJC. Or, outside many large office buildings.
The only place smoking should be legal is in the privacy of your own single-family detached home. Even then, only if you don't have any minors living there.
As long as X can X freely in their own X while their children are there and unable to escape it, the X has not been eliminated.
...
As long as parents can endlessly stock junk food freely in their own homes and cars while their children are there and unable to escape it, the influence of junk food has not been eliminated.
The problem, fundamentally, is that people can be inconsiderate of others. I would classify someone who smokes in their car with non-smokers in their presence, children and adults alike, as jerks. It's a dick move. But don't try to legislate against every dick move - teach people to be more thoughtful of others.
The game isn't to find something exactly analogous to something else in order to expose the flaw in the structure of someones thinking. Example: take a gospel, replace every instance of the word God with Mickey Mouse. Is Mickey Mouse analogous to God? No, but the trick helps us analyze the original text in a more objective way.
My conclusion don't try to legislate against every dick move - teach people to be more thoughtful of others was an objective response to more laws governing what people can do in their own homes. Now let's explore it further because the concept of banning smoking in someone's home is fundamentally flawed:
How do you enforce such a law? Can someone just barge into your home, slap the cigarette out of your hand and give you a fine or take your children away? Could it be abused much the same way neighbors might falsely report you for neglecting a child because they have a beef with you? How much do you fine a person if the purpose of the law is to protect the children when fining the parents will leave the children with fewer resources? Do you give the parent a criminal record? Will that help the children more? What evidence is required before barging into someones home? Do you even barge into someones home or do you politely ask them at the font door "Have you been smoking in front of your children?"
PS: Risking others lives for fun or profit seems to exist in a weird mental place. Drink and drive? Speed? Drive while really sleepy? Second hand smoke? Pollution? CO2? Fire a gun randomly in the air?
As outlined in a separate comment in this thread, your solution is unenforceable unless you want to erode some pretty fundamental freedoms. THAT'S evil. No, wait...it's not evil. "Evil" is a gross oversimplification of things. It's anti-intellectual and avoids any sort of meaningful discussion of why people do the things they do.
You feel compelled to help prevent potential respiratory issues and cancer in children exposed to second hand smoke by policing what people do in their own homes. But in the process of policing this issue you potentially do more harm than good - how do you solve the issue? Fines? Makes the family poor. Criminal record? Makes the family poor. Take away the children? Your intentions are good but I can only see the medicine being worse than the malady.
I just suggested that risking lives should be viewed as more than just 'a dick move'. Cutting in a school lunch line is 'a dick move' dumping lead into a towns drinking water is worse than that.
PS: We used to think beating children was ok so times change even if few people in up in prison.
I did put words in your mouth but the implication of your original comment, that smoking around children be banned in the home, was that there would need to be some sort of policing of this activity. To police an activity in an individuals home we need to impinge on some pretty important freedoms. So we have a choice - a severe nanny state where we address shitty behavior on a case-by-case basis or teach people to be more thoughtful so that we can prevent shitty behavior from the outset.
PS: We used to think beating children was ok so times change even if few people in up in prison.
Sending a parent to jail for beating their child is wise because beating a child imperils the child's life. On the other hand, sending someone's parents to jail for smoking around them will be more damaging than exposure to cigarette smoke. The medicine is worse than the disease. What's more, you assume all people are rational actors which we know is fantasy - just because some people have gone to prison in the past for some random transgression won't be enough to stop another person from doing the same.
Even though this unfortunately isn't the case, jail should only be used to separate violent people from the general population - there are far better methods for dealing with non-violent offenders, chiefly community service or a fine.
Also, if you have 10 equally valid issues at a national level. Then 100% fixing one of them almost impossible and probably extremely expensive where making a 20% dent in all 10 of them is more valuable and probably far less costly.
Food doesn't fly from the pantry into the child's mouth however children can only eat what their parents buy them. There are minor deviations from this rule e.g. the child has money to buy something nutritious or they can source food from another household. Otherwise having junk food in the house pretty much guarantees it'll find its way into the child's stomach.
You're comparing apples to oranges.
For the sake of the exercise I can compare apples to oranges. The exercise is to identify fundamental flaws in the OP's reasoning, not make simple analogies. The OP wants to ban passive smoking in the most private of spaces - feel free to explain how you do that in a way that won't be worse than exposing a child to passive smoking.
That's a bit like saying "the cult of modern medicine needs to end now that I'm healthy", isn't it?
Having won all the battles they should have won, the cult is reaching to win battles they shouldn't. Keeping people well informed about the choices they make is good. Keeping public places reasonably free of smoke is good.
But once you inform smokers about the consequences of their choices and prevent them from affecting those who don't want to make those choices ... it's time to step back and allow people to make their own decisions.
If somebody wants to make an unhealthy choice for themselves, I don't have a problem with it. Maybe they'll need to pay a different health insurance premium to make up for it, and that's okay, but otherwise it is not the prerogative of my self or any government to intrude on personal choices which have effects limited to the individual.
Only in the West. Here in SE Asia you're hard pressed to find a cafe or restaurant that isn't completely engulfed in cigarette smoke during business hours. Public smoking bans seem a long way off here.
This is probably not true. Sure, smokers know that cigarettes are harmful and that their live is probably going to be shortened by smoking, but they do not know the rates or severity of the various health problems.
For example Most men do not know that smoking is a leading cause of male impotence. People don't understand why their surgeon wants them to stop smoking (reduced risks during surgery; better healing after).
It's not much of a choice when you're psychologically manipulated through marketing to start smoking and then physically dependent and mentally addicted thereafter.
The second-hand smoke nuisance has been eliminated in public places
This is nonsense. I can't walk into my office without going through a giant cloud of smoke. Smokers are literally smoking right next to the signs that say, "No smoking within 30 feet of door" that are less than a foot from the door.
I have no respect for this abdication of personal responsibility.
>This is nonsense. I can't walk into my office without going through a giant cloud of smoke. Smokers are literally smoking right next to the signs that say, "No smoking within 30 feet of door" that are less than a foot from the door.
I likewise have no sympathy. There's a difference between an actual public health concern (my intention using 'nuisance') and the nonexistent right to not be offended. Sharing public space means being inconvenienced sometimes. There's a big difference between working in a smoky bar for 10 hour shifts, and smelling cigarettes for 30 seconds as you walk in a building.
Of course that doesn't stop the majority of Republican congresscritters from touting it as the best thing for "deregulation" since sliced bread...
The CoC is shady, like you said. And it supports the GOP. It is not itself the GOP.
"It's pretty silly to suggest that the GOP is an enemy of small to medium businesses"
This I disagree with though. To me, having spent most of my time in GOP owned areas, my conclusion is that the GOP parades small/medium business values to their support base, but when it really comes down to someone writing legislation on K-street, it almost always favors the megacorps. The GOP is, indeed, in my mind at least, anti small/med business, but they sell themselves otherwise.
They're just good at propaganda.
GOP health care policy strongly favors small business owners. For instance, the GOP opposes the employer health care mandate.
The GOP's stance on regulations strongly favors small business owners: they disfavor them pretty much across the board. On a message board, it may seem like environmental regulations matter primarily to giant extractive industry companies, but most industrial businesses in the US are small businesses.
I'd be interested in some specific examples of policies the GOP supports that the Democrats don't support that aren't beneficial to small businesses.
Two caveats:
* I'm a Democrat. "Do what's best for the public school system shalt be the whole of the law" is roughly what I believe.
* The calculus is different if by "small business" you really (perhaps accidentally) mean "small tech company".
I suppose this is more of an example of a policy that they oppose, but some kind of healthcare reform to produce a working insurance market for individual and small-time purchasers (i.e. not big corporations buying group plans) comes to mind as something that benefits small businesspeople. Interestingly the U.S. Chamber of Commerce did support Hillarycare in the '90s, but changed its mind later.
Maybe we have different definitions of small businessperson, but I also don't know any (across several industries) who make the $400k+ post-deductions needed to be in the top marginal tax bracket. Not only in tech, but also in traditional small-business areas like dry-cleaning, the restaurant business, repair shops, or small-scale retail, only the most successful owners clear anything near that. What definition of small businessperson has most small businesspeople being in this bracket?
Most small business owners that I know would prefer single-payer health care to avoid the distraction of employer-sponsored coverage. Also, the people I've known who have expressed interest in quitting their jobs to start their own business cite health care as one of the main reasons for why they've been unwilling to pull the trigger, and this is especially true for those who have children. But the people I know may not represent the majority of small business owners.
Edit: Oh, because they're funded by tobacco companies. Welp.
And then a serious question:
What does it cost CVS to leave the Chamber of Commerce? The CoC is a conservative lobbying group. CVS already operates a 4:1 Republican-leaning lobbying operation. Were there any material benefits to CVS to remain affiliated with the CoC?
It's amazing people's beliefs in regards to alcohol. I had a friend, who was already drunk, rant at me about my use of cannabis because they didn't like the thought of something that takes away your control. Alcohol is so often thought of as a "nothing" drug even though it is probably one of the worst recreational drugs.
Supposedly a portion of a hangover is withdrawals (which is why the "hair of the hound that bit you" is effective). However the crux of your point remains true: alcohol withdrawals only last a morning (by my experience) where nicotine withdrawals last a few weeks to months (also personal experience).
The last time I drank was probably 5 days ago and I have no cravings. The last time I smoked was 8 months ago and I have cravings at least once every 2-3 days. Tobacco is much, much, worse.
Put differently, they seem to have an intuitive understanding to only use placebos for illnesses that are well served by placebos. They have no rational understanding of that, of course. But they do get a lot more benefits from placebos than I do, so I can't say they're entirely wrong.
The CoC's purpose is to support the interests of it's members. So they absolutely should be doing this. What good is a chamber of commerce that arbitrarily decides to throw some of its members under the bus when new laws threaten their businesses? The real complaint people should be making is that it allows tobacco businesses as members, or even that the government allows tobacco businesses to exist at all.
What shocks me the most is that the CVS pharmacy was selling cigarettes 1 year ago! What?! Pharmacies sell cigarettes in America?!
Jamaica is one example, did you look at the others? In some cases it appears the CoC's stance goes beyond simple good faith defense of their members.
> What shocks me the most is that the CVS pharmacy was selling cigarettes 1 year ago! What?! Pharmacies sell cigarettes in America?!
To my knowledge, they all still do so with the exception of CVS.
http://www.bbcamerica.com/mind-the-gap/2013/10/29/6-differen...
TL;DR pharmacies are located in convenience stores in the US.
http://www.nytimes.com/2015/07/01/business/international/us-...
I've heard scattered accounts that when a convenience store stops carrying cigarettes they also draw fewer problem customers, but haven't validated it.
Tobacco is on the way out in the US, in 10 or 20 years you'll have to buy tobacco in specialty stores. I think CVS just saw the writing on the wall and seized a convenient opportunity to jettison the business.
The difference is that people can get drunk and blow out their liver or get fat and blow out their pancreas (usually) without direct effects to those around them. Since 90% of tobacco users have to use it in a way that blows every bystander's lungs out while they are blowing their own out, it gets much more vitriol.
What's funny about this is that it's not necessarily true. The whole "secondhand smoke" thing appears to be one of those convenient lies aimed at a greater good. It certainly isn't blowing out anyone's lungs. Still, the falloff in smoking is something I'm totally into, just because it stinks.
There is no science at all supporting the notion that the harm from ethanol approaches that of tobacco, so I'm not too worried about the people you know. In particular, the addiction rates are vastly different.
Basically, your opening sentence says it all: your point relies on spin to be sharp.
CVS's PBM subsidiary last year was also proposing charging an additional fee to members who filled their prescriptions at pharmacies that also sold tobacco.[2] Not sure if this ever happened or not; that seems anti-competitive. I don't see why filling my prescription at Walgreens instead of CVS should cost me more, only because you can buy a pack of smokes at Walgreens.
[1] http://www.cvshealth.com/newsroom/press-releases/pharmacy-se...
[2] http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/wonkblog/wp/2014/10/20/a...
Customers dying younger because they are buying an addicting, health-damaging product may produce some money if you are selling them the product, but if you are selling other products -- especially other expensive, long-term regular-purchase products that they will reliably come back to you for -- it can be a net loss. Perhaps CVS has decided that there's more return on customer acquisition dollars if it gets out of the cigarette business (both selling and promoting indirectly via USCC) and stops actively killing off its own reliable customer basis (and, incidentally, other people).
I don't know that that's really all that "cynical" of a spin, but its a self-interest profit motive rather than an altruistic one.
> I've heard scattered accounts that when a convenience store stops carrying cigarettes they also draw fewer problem customers, but haven't validated it.
That's quite possibly a factor, but CVS isn't just a "convenience store"; they are drugstores (that is, a key feature of their stores is the pharmacy) and they also have and are expanding in-store clinics (so they are also health-care providers.)
CVS has basically decided that smoking is on its way out the door, and they've decided to forgo the remaining profits in selling a smaller number of cigarettes each year for the next few years. They've decided that they'll be better off getting ahead of this trend, shifting to more health-oriented branding, and opposing smoking publicly and vocally.
Tobacco takes up valuable real-estate in your retail area (right at counter--right at checkout). Tobacco sales continue to fall so your gross sales are falling. Tobacco prices tend to be regulated heavily (minimum price that you can't sell under), so profit is probably fixed. Underage tobacco purchases are heavily penalized--so your cost due some store selling to a minor is minimized.
CVS took a bit of hit, but I suspect that they have numbers on the profit they gain by repurposing that space. I'm sure somebody crunched the numbers.
The cynical spin was healthcare pre-2008. Today, our healthcare industry is finally making meaningful changes to its model, moving from fee-for-service toward value-based care and risk sharing. [1]
This means payers, providers, and everyone in between is now incentivized to get IN FRONT of problems (like smoking) before it creates an even bigger, high-cost/high-risk patient population (heart disease, cancer, etc). Those who don't will get phased out / merged.
The reality is ~75% of the $2.2 trillion we spend on healthcare per year goes toward fighting said chronic conditions. From a distribution perspective, 20% of the population is responsible for ~80% of costs... 5% of population, ~50% of costs. Moving the needle a small amount matters a lot.
[1] This is one example of a brand changing due to industry consolidation. Prices are being commoditized across the board for care, for drugs, etc. As others have said, CVS & Walgreens are no longer just pharmacies selling drugs. They are diversifying and growing into providers just like payers.
CVS is a pharmacy so keeping patients alive longer means more money on perscription medication.
If people smoke and die sooner, they will in theory (and practice) need no more of the prescription drugs which CVS sells and profits from. Heck, statistics showing that smoking reduces total health care costs (and, less relevantly to the immediate discussion, pension costs) by killing people younger have been used by cigarette smoking companies as part of campaigns against government anti-smoking campaigns around the world.
Aside from the moral aspects of that argument, the financial aspects work exactly the opposite for people selling health care services -- which CVS does, both as a pharmacy and a clinic operator -- as they would on people funding health care costs.
They are actually paid by the insurance companies to provide these services.
Assuming that customer retention is cheaper than acquisition, it directly reaps the returns from not killing its customers.
> That dynamic would apply to a health insurer or provider, not a glorified convenience store.
CVS is, among other things, an insurer (or, rather, a pharmacy benefit management company serving insurers, but the incentives are pretty similar with regard to not killing the insurers customers), and also operates the nations largest walk-in clinic brand in its in-store clinics (so, its also a provider, and not just in the sense that every pharmacy is.)
Public goods problem -- you have to subtract off all the customers you lose to other companies that have extra money due to not cutting off the cigarette revenue stream.
Might also help them position themselves to shift more and more towards being a credible health care service provider.
However, there still are a lot of smokers who would be less likely to visit your place of business if you stopped to stock tobacco products. So you continue to deal in it even though it makes you little money.
If a large player leaves a market like this, they drop a low-profit use of shelf space, but also lose smokers to competitors. In that position, the most desirable endpoint would be more bans on smoking, because less smokers mean less of an advantage for competitors.
There were bars that were in danger of going out of business because they couldn't get a waiver and enough of their customers were going elsewhere.
http://www.cdc.gov/tobacco/data_statistics/fact_sheets/adult...
I'm not convinced that's enough to make a significant dent in business, especially if you balance it out with those who will be attracted by the idea that their clothes will not smell like smoke.
Non-smokers who drink already have established places where they go. Those places will have done nothing to alienate them and cause them to change their habits. They'll keep going where they have been going because for them, nothing will have changed.
Bars and restaurants don't always operate with huge margins. If 15% of their customers decided to go elsewhere overnight, I have no doubt that it would cause serious problems.
Yes. Selecting a place to go is like the old days of renting a movie with a group of friends: it's the most insistently intransigent who get to make the choice, and the nicotine addicts will falt out to refuse to accommodate the non-addicts.
It's no wonder than countries with high rates of smoking (France, Japan) who have diets that lack all the garbage the CVS's of the world peddle have some of the highest life expectancies.
Smokers are just an easy, minority target to vilify and it needs to stop.