SAN FRANCISCO -- Walgreen Co. is suing the city of San Francisco over legislation that would ban the sale of tobacco products in pharmacies, but city officials said Wednesday the drugstore chain faces an uphill battle in striking down the new law, according to a Reuters report.
The lawsuit, filed in state court in San Francisco on Monday, argues that the ordinance is illegal because it targets drugstores while ignoring other retailers that have pharmacies and sell tobacco products, including some grocery stores.
The lawsuit seeks to have the ordinance declared unconstitutional and [image-nocss] adopted improperly under city law and seeks to prevent the city from enforcing the ordinance.
A spokesperson for City Attorney Dennis Herrera said Walgreen will have to prove to the court that city officials had no basis for the controversial law. "The basis for this is that as consumers we rely on stores like Walgreens to provide for health care needs, not to enable deadly habits," Matt Dorsey told Reuters. "As deadly habits go, they don't get much worse than cigarette smoking, which is the leading cause of preventable death."
A hearing in the case was scheduled for September 30, a day before the ordinance was to go into place, Walgreen spokesperson Michael Polzin told the news agency.
Boston, too, is currently considering a similar ordinance over the sale of cigarettes, said the report. The city's public health commission gave preliminary approval last week to regulations banning tobacco sales on college campuses and at drugstores.
Thomas Ryan, the CEO of Walgreens rival CVS, Woonsocket, R.I., has discussed the philosophical problems a pharmacy faces in selling cigarettes. "We have a vision in our company to strive to improve human life, and it is a challenge around cigarettes," he said at a conference last year, according to a Wall Street Journal Report. "It's a big number from a dollar standpoint…. We've had internal battles and discussions. I wouldn't rule it out at some point down the road."
But CVS said it continues to sell cigarettes because "it is company policy to try and provide products customers choose." A Walgreens spokesperson told the Journal that the company was concerned the ban would inconvenience consumers.
And Tiffani Bruce, a spokesperson for Deerfield, Ill.-based Walgreens, told the Associated Press that smokers will just buy their cigarettes elsewhere.
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