Over the long run, as the New Jersey and California delegations proposed at the American Medical Association's House of Delegates meeting in July, the most desirable and effective antismoking policy may be to eliminate federal subsidies to tobacco farmers and help them convert to growing other crops. In the meantime, it is important to realize that the commercial benefits from this crop extend to selling as well as growing tobacco—making some strange bedfellows.
In San Francisco, 93% of non-clinic-affiliated pharmacies sold cigarettes in 1978, according to Steven A. Schroeder, MD, and Jonathan A. Showstack, MPH, of the University of California, San Francisco School of Medicine (Am J Public Health 68:494-495, 1978). This, despite a 1973 California Pharmaceutical Association resolution stating that "pharmacists... shall discourage the sale of tobacco products in the pharmacies in which they practice."
More blatant conflicts were turned up by Jerome S. Brody, MD, in a telephone