Sunday, February 7, 2016

The Big Event


There was not a period of time too long after the booming era of cigarettes until scientists uncovered the data that linked the action of smoking said cigarettes to the disease of lung cancer. It was in 1957 that the Surgeon General officially stated this report. The controversial subject of smoking has thus been on the mind of the healthcare field since then. It was on February 5th, 2014 that a pharmaceutical chain was the first of its kind to take a firm stance on one side of this discussion. CVS Pharmacies nationwide announced that they would cease the sales of all tobacco products over the course of eight months. During this time, CVS also intended to transform the entirety of their company to be geared more towards the health of an individual. For example, the pharmacy company would adopt a new logo of a square-edged red heart, and would call themselves CVS Health, rather than CVS Caremark. The controversy was stirred even more by the declaration that this change was also geared towards helping their customers to quit smoking. The pharmacy, through its stance on the controversy, encouraged its smoking customers to quit the habit through public media advertisements and the basic ‘out of sight, out of mind’ theory. This event was announced to the public through a commercial that simply shows people in different situations breathing deeply. The whole commercial is the sound of deep breaths and a voice at the end that explains how CVS believes there is an importance to stop smoking. CVS’s commercial stresses smokers to quit for their own health, and for the good of anyone else close to them that will not have to breathe and smell their habit.

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