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Since you have to be at least 18 to have a credit card, we will leave it up to adults to decide how to use them. The best thing we have seen is people sending them to family and friends to encourage them to stop smoking. One customer purchased several cases and passed out packs to celebrate his one year anniversary of not smoking. The picture to the left shows how candy cigarettes looked in the 1950s.

My favorite candy memory would have to be candy cigarettes. I remember hanging out with my best friend across the street when we were about 8 or 9. We would always want to act cool and be with the older guys on our street who always used to smoke cigarettes. Well there was no way me and my friend were going to start smoking, we both had bad asthma and could never touch the stuff (or ever want too). We would then always walk down the street with as much change we could find under our couches to the candy store and buy boxes of candy cigarettes. We felt so cool. Looking back now, I don’t know why I ever wanted to hang out with people like that, but at the time it felt good to feel like that, and in a weird way, that candy gave us confidence. My grandfather was a heavy smoker too, and later lost his life to lung cancer, but whenever he saw me with those candy cigarettes, he told me and my friend to stick with the candy, not the real stuff. that has always stayed with me. Steven from Pennsylvania

We lived in a small town in the 40’s. Nothing was like a bunch of friends going to spend our nickles and dimes on candy at our little market. We’d all get our favorites and go to the park to eat it. I’d pass around my pack of cigarettes and we’d all sit there pretending to smoke them, till the taste got to us. Then they disappeared, leaving the tell tale white powder on our lips. I can still remember the sweet spicy taste of my first cigarettes. Jennie from California

My brother and I used to stash a box of candy cigarettes in our backpacks along with a favorite stuffed animal and a few pencils. The best time to eat them was on a cold winter day when we could see our breath hanging on the air. I distinctly remember a frigid January morning out by the flagpole in front of my elementary school, passing around candy cigarettes to friends. We would practice holding the thin white candy sticks between two fingers and exhale “smoke.” It’s amazing I never became a real smoker. Maybe I got it all out of my system in third grade after all, actual cigarettes taste terrible by comparison. Jessica from Missouri

My Uncle Bill always kept candy cigarettes on hand in an end table always made a bee line for that drawer as soon as we walked in the door. I recently ordered some from you, along with the bubblegum candy cigarettes and both arrived fresh and very tasty. Just as good as I remember them. Your service was prompt, and the items were well packed to prevent breakage. I will order from you again! Warren from Ohio

Vintage Candy Box

Cvs vows to quit selling tobacco products – nytimes.com

Discount cigarettes – west sacramento, ca

On Wednesday, Walgreens said it had been assessing its sales of tobacco products for some time. We will continue to evaluate the choice of products our customers want, while also helping to educate them and providing smoking cessation products and alternatives that help to reduce the demand for tobacco products, according to a statement released by the company. Although CVS ranks first in overall sales and pharmacy sales among the nation s drugstores, according to analysts, Walgreens is the largest in the number of stores.

Rite Aid, another large chain, said in a statement it continually reviewed product mix to make sure it suits the needs and desires of customers.

As for driving away customers to competitors, Troyen A. Brennan, the executive vice president and chief medical officer for CVS, said It s obvious that the average person will just find somewhere else to buy cigarettes. What we re thinking about is if others want to emulate this business decision we ve made, then over time that will make cigarettes less available and scientific literature does suggest that a reduction in the availability of cigarettes reduces smoking.

Dr. Brennan, together with Steven A. Schroeder of the Smoking Cessation Leadership Center at the University of California, San Francisco, wrote an op ed article making the case for eliminating tobacco products from drugstores in The Journal of the American Medical Association published online on Wednesday.

Some 18 percent of American adults smoke, down from 42 percent in 1965. In places like New York City, which has used a combination of steep taxes on cigarettes and bans on smoking in most places to discourage smokers, the decline is even greater, down to 14 percent.

But health experts remain concerned because the rate of decline has stagnated over the last decade, and some 480,000 deaths each year are linked to smoking. From 1999 to 2003, for example, the smoking prevalence among high school girls dropped 37 percent, according to the Centers for Disease Control, but from 2003 to 2007, the decline was only 2.3 percent.

This month, a group of seven advocacy organizations including the American Heart Association and the Campaign for Tobacco Free Kids called on governments to take steps to reduce smoking rates to less than 10 percent over the next decade and ensure no American is exposed to secondhand smoke within five years.

We have seen the decrease in initiation of smoking plateau, particularly among some populations of young people, and we ve been working very hard on those populations that have been stubbornly hard to reduce but we need to redouble our efforts, said Risa Lavizzo Mourey, the chief executive of the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation. Decreasing the availability of tobacco products as CVS is doing is an important and bold step toward making it harder for people to get access to these harmful products.

Coincidentally, the F.D.A. announced on Tuesday the start of a national education program aimed at preventing smoking among youth. The ads, which will be distributed across social media platforms, try to show teenagers the toll that smoking takes on the body in memorable ways, such as a young man who uses a pair of pliers to pull a stained tooth from his mouth to buy a pack of cigarettes.

A shortage of primary care doctors and expanding access to health care coverage under the Affordable Care Act is turning drugstore chains into big players in the nation s health care system. Consumers routinely get flu shots in drugstores, for instance, and clinics staffed by nurse practitioners or physician assistants and offering basic care for common ailments like strep throat or pink eye are popping up everywhere from Walgreens to Walmart.

A report last year by Accenture predicted such so called retail clinics were poised to grow at a rate of 25 to 30 percent over the next few years, which would swell the number to 2,800 in 2015, from 1,400 in 2012.

CVS s 800 MinuteClinics already account for most of such outlets, and Mr. Merlo said the company hoped to add another 700 for a total of 1,500 by 2017. For that reason, he said, the decision to stop selling tobacco products was really more of a discussion about how to position the company for future growth.

The company estimated that the decision would erase 17 cents in earnings per share of stock annually, but that it had identified ways of offsetting the impact on profits. (The earnings hit this year will only be 6 cents to 9 cents a share while the company works through its remaining inventory of tobacco products.)

The company hopes to make up some of the lost revenue and income with a smoking cessation program that it is starting this spring with the goal of getting half a million Americans to stop smoking. Helena Foulkes, executive vice president for CVS, said This is the kind of offering we can bring to clients like insurance plans and companies, many of which will pay for such a program.