Piously Wising Up At the Drugstore, A Bit Belatedly

THE WORD HAS COME DOWN FROM a corporate high places, as on a stone tablet, inscribed with a single declaration, descending by CEO from some financial Mt. Sanai, adorned with all manner of media hoopla; the CVS pharmacy retail chain, the nation's second largest, will no longer sell tobacco products. The enlightened rationale, according to Moses of the bottom line, has to do with a sudden, Saul of Tarsus like thunder bolt of a revelation having to do with the harmful effects of tobacco, in a business seeking to more nobly advance the cause of human health. A pharmacy, after all, is supposed to make people well, not ill. Certainly it shouldn't seek profit through the merchandising of death in a cardboard box. Let the grocery stores serve that function; the purity of the pristine reputation of the lily white pharmaceutical monopoly is at stake. Ignoring the obvious question of why it took fifty years years for this awareness to manifest - cigarettes were declared lethal, officially, in 1964 - it appears that untangling the complicated tangled webs of hypocritical free enterprise requires decades of unraveling. Tobacco sales constitute a two billion dollar a year income source for ownership, or roughly three percent of gross corporate profit, accumulated across about seventy six hundred outlets. According to a newly pious CEO, this mmomentous decison will significantly reduce cigarette smoking in America, especially among the very young. Where else can one go to purchase cigarettes? Nowhere, implies the man in the five hundred dollar suit, hands folded piously in exalted magnanimity. Sales of all tobacco products are to cease no later than October first of this year; or, in plain language, juste after one final two billion dollar corporate haul, for old times sake. Who says our corporate oligarchial masters are unconcerned with our well being? CVS cigarette sales have only killed a few thousand voluntary victims, with only a hanful more to come.