New Jersey could soon bar pharmacies — as well as supermarkets and other retailers with pharmacies on their premises — from selling tobacco products.

CVS Health voluntarily stopped selling cigarettes in its stores nationwide five years ago and Target quit selling them in the 1990s. And a bill (S992) under consideration in the state Legislature would impose a ban on all pharmacies operating in the Garden State.

Corinne Orlando of the American Heart Association on Tuesday told a state Senate committee that given pharmacies’ expansions into retail clinics, it’s contradictory to sell tobacco products in the same setting.

But the bill proposes to go even further, prohibiting businesses like supermarkets and big box stores with pharmacies from offering tobacco products, including electronic smoking devices, for sale, too.

State Sen. Joe Vitale, D-Middlesex, who sponsored the bill, said the law shouldn’t treat a standalone pharmacy that also sells “rubber bands and pantyhose and batteries” one way and supermarkets differently because “your first sale is bread and milk and hamburger meat, yet you have a pharmacy.”

“So whether it’s a large big box pharmacy selling cigarettes or a big box store making the business decision to place a pharmacy in their facility, that’s a decision they made. They wanted to have it both ways,” he added.

The state Senate’s Health, Human Services and Senior Citizens approved the bill Tuesday afternoon.

Jonathan Resnick of New Brunswick-based Resnick Distributors, which supplies Wakefern Food Corporation’s Shoprite stores, said such a prohibition is picking winners and losers in the market and threatens his business while doing little to curb tobacco usage.

The New Jersey Food Council’s Mary Ellen Peppard warned it would drive sales to other states.

The bill clarifies that pharmacies and businesses that possess a license to dispense medical cannabis would still be allowed to do so.

“If a pharmacy like a CVS or Walgreens is issued a license to sell medical cannabis that’s quite different than selling cigarettes and tobacco and the effects that tobacco has on the body,” Vitale said in defense of the bill. “We all know the hundreds if not more chemicals that are in tobacco products ... that are harmful to the body and deadly for that matter. Medical cannabis is a pharmaceutical.”

The bill would need to be passed by the full state Senate and Assembly and then signed by Gov. Phil Murphy to become law.

Samantha Marcus may be reached at smarcus@njadvancemedia.com. Follow her on Twitter @samanthamarcus.

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