Voisin / Phanie / Rex Features
More than half of people polled by The Pharmaceutical Journal say that pharmacies should stock e-cigarettes.
Of 544 people who participated in an online poll, 46.1% said that e-cigarettes should be available from pharmacies because they were a “safer option for smokers”. A further 7.1% said they should be stocked because it would give pharmacists “new opportunities to offer stop smoking advice”.
Nearly 20% of those surveyed were unsure about whether pharmacies should stock e-cigarettes. Reasons for this uncertainty were that responders thought that e-cigarettes should be regulated as medicines (15.9%) and reservations about selling products linked with tobacco companies (3.8%).
Of the 146 people who said pharmacies should not stock e-cigarettes, 61 (11.2% of the total) said they would prefer to offer a licensed stop-smoking product while the remainder — 85 (15.6% of the total) — said they did not believe that smoking-related “lifestyle products” had a place in pharmacy.
