cvs health stops selling tobacco says stopping sales has had big impact CVS Celebrates 10 Years of

More than 5 million deaths per year are caused by tobacco use

Q: Can you envision using your ownership of Aetna in the future to begin to nudge people to get health care services at a MinuteClinic or HealthHUB

Merlo: We sold approximately $2 billion of tobacco and related items

Because from the physicians and nurses point of view, youre either all in for healthcare or youre not. He says he thinks that having been the first pharmacy to drop cigarettes will be a competitive advantage against other retail pharmacies because of the credibility it will give CVS when talking to physicians

Read more about the efforts weve made since going #TobaccoFree five years ago: cvs.co/2UpTXXk DYK: Within the first year that we stopped selling tobacco products, nearly 100M fewer cigarette packs were sold

However, CVS said it does expect to lose about $2 billion in annual revenue from tobacco shoppers, equaling about 17 cents per share