“Urging” versus coercion in anti-smoking campaigns
Earlier this month, 28 attorneys general, including Illinois’ Lisa Madigan, sent a letter to major convenience retailers including Rite Aid, Walmart and Walgreens, urging them to stop selling tobacco products in their stores. This came shortly after CVS voluntarily announced that it would completely phase out sales of tobacco products by October 2014. Madigan and...
Earlier this month, 28 attorneys general, including Illinois’ Lisa Madigan, sent a letter to major convenience retailers including Rite Aid, Walmart and Walgreens, urging them to stop selling tobacco products in their stores. This came shortly after CVS voluntarily announced that it would completely phase out sales of tobacco products by October 2014.
Madigan and the others generally argue that the sale of tobacco products at stores that also provide health-care products and services is contradictory, and suggest that the availability of cigarettes in drug stores might be a reason why a large number of smokers who say they want to quit in a given year never get around to it.
One might think this approach by the attorneys general is better than states banning or restricting the sale of products outright, and that’s true, as far as it goes. But although the letters don’t explicitly threaten legal action against retailers, there is still the implicit threat that the state may take action of some kind against businesses that refuse to comply. And if some businesses comply, that could make it easier for the state to enact legislation banning or restricting sales later, which could harm convenience stores and similar small businesses that lack the political influence or resources to fight back.
But since when is it an attorney general’s job to badger companies into selling or not selling legal products? Isn’t Lisa Madigan supposed to enforce the laws that are actually on the books, not make businesses conform to her personal preferences?
And where do such campaigns end? Plenty of unhealthy products are sold at all kinds of stores, including drug stores, every day, from alcohol to fatty foods. Will the attorney general’s office continue to crusade until every store carries what Lisa Madigan considers to be the proper combinations of products?
CVS received a lot of praise for its decision to stop selling cigarettes, and it’s CVS’s right to decide what legal products to sell or not sell to willing adults in its stores. But this is something CVS was perfectly able to decide to do on its own.
It’s undoubtedly preferable that the nanny state nags through letters rather than ban products outright. But even better would be a government at all levels that simply left people to make their own choices and left the moralistic grandstanding to others.