In 2011 I posted this petition to try to get CVS and Rite Aid to stop stop selling tobacco (see my 2011 blog post). Although the petition closed in 2013 with just under 2800 signatures, today is finally the day I’ve been waiting for:
CVS has announced it will stop selling tobacco products!
Whether or not the petition has anything to do with it I will never know. Nonetheless this is a huge step forward. As @RichDuszak tweeted back to me this morning, this is truly a disruptive announcement and hopefully lead to other pharmacies and retailers following suit.
I applaud CVS for taking this bold stance and eschewing approximately $2 billion in revenue to follow their healthcare mission.
Gut Check Blog 
I’m sure the petition perked someone’s eyes there. It takes years to shift momentum, especially in healthcare. Let’s hope Wall Street doesn’t short CVS for this and reward Walgreens
Absolutely, thanks for the support Faisal. It takes a village to move a mountain, and the petition was probably just one of the villagers!
Congratulations are in order here, O Most Excellent Physician. Whether catalyst or precipitant, one man can indeed affect the world for something GOOD.
And that’s from a patient at one remove from 200 years of tobacco farmers. But on the New Hampshire side of the family, there was no smoking…and just as an example of the weirdness of connections, that same non-smoker Grandfather Knight, was an executive with the McElwain shoe factory in Nashua, NH.
“While serving in the army during World War I, Ward Melville struck up a profitable friendship with J. Franklin McElwain, a New Hampshire shoe manufacturer.” Via the shape-shifting nature of the business world, the McElwain/ Melville story wove itself into the trail that ended with CVS.
http://www.fundinguniverse.com/company-histories/cvs-corporation-history/
(Scroll down to “Concentrating on Shoes from the Late 19th Century to the Early 1960s” if you’re interested. First three paragraphs are adequate.)
Small world!